


Shell Game

by rivkat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU, M/M, Reversebang
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-24
Updated: 2012-11-24
Packaged: 2017-11-19 09:13:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/571651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rivkat/pseuds/rivkat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam and Adam Winchester know when they’re being conned. Problem is, this new guy Dean Milligan seems to really be their half-brother. Adam is unamused, Sam is unfazed, and Dean is inappropriate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shell Game

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Full Circle](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/13839) by machidieles. 



> Written for Reversebang. The art: [Full Circle](http://machidieles.livejournal.com/2742.html), by machidieles. Thanks to giandujakiss for beta.

“I’m his son,” the stranger said, and Sam and Adam gaped at him.

“We’re his sons,” Adam said, recovering more quickly.

“What?” The stranger looked, insultingly, skeptical. “Even if he missed a couple of birthdays, I think he would’ve told me if I had _brothers_.”

The waitress, who’d been hovering just out of reach waiting for their order, found someplace else to be. Sam sighed; he’d have taken a refill on his water, at least. “Trust me,” he said, “we are John Winchester’s sons,” and if his tone got him a dirty look from Adam, faithful even when Dad was ash, Adam would just have to deal. “John and Mary Winchester, married in 1979, first child Sam in 1983, second Adam in 1987.”

“John Winchester’s first child was born in 1979,” the guy said flatly. “That’d be me, Dean. So I guess he stayed with your mom instead of leaving her when she was about to have a baby and coming back every once in a while for a baseball game, hunh? How’d that work out for you?”

 _You have no idea_ , Sam wanted to say. _You dodged a bullet made of blood_. “Do you know what John … what our father did?”

“Wait!” Adam said, putting his hand on Sam’s arm, still acting like he was the one in charge, same as always despite age and Hell and everything else that meant he should be following Sam’s lead. “Don’t you think we ought to check this guy’s story out before we agree that he’s our long-lost brother? I mean, I like a good soap opera, but that’s a little sweeps week even for me.”

Sam didn’t think Dean was playing them. He just … didn’t seem like the type. And what would be the point? Sam and Adam didn’t limit their hunting to help out relatives. “Whoever his father is,” Sam pointed out, “his mom’s missing, and he called us for help. Maybe we should work on that first.”

Dean sneered a little at that, but he gave the details of his mother’s disappearance anyway. 

After they managed to snag the waitress long enough to order a round, Dean excused himself to go to the bathroom, transparently to let Sam and Adam discuss matters.

“You think he’s really our brother?” Adam asked, fiddling with his beer. Honestly, Sam didn’t even know how he got served. Even his gift of gab and Sam’s talent for faking IDs didn’t seem like it should be sufficient, with a baby face like that.

Sam considered the question. “We can have a blood test, but, yeah, I guess … it makes a kind of sense. Dad never talked about his life before he met Mom, and you know as well as I do that he could’ve been off doing anything most of the time and told us it was a hunt. We didn’t know any better. Don’t you believe him?”

“Dude, he looks like me!” Adam complained, which Sam took as agreement. Adam was, in Sam’s opinion, overly optimistic: Adam was good-looking, but Dean took those lips and that bone structure and went to higher places.

“Well, Dad did have a type,” Sam said. The steady tick-tick in his head telling him just how long it had been since he’d seen Ruby was, for once, a welcome distraction. Dean Milligan required him to rewrite so many things he’d known for sure about his father. Yes, Dad had done the nasty with a barmaid or two, sometimes loudly enough to embarrass Sam and Adam in the room next door—but a whole _family_ , another _son_ , that was a whole different level of secret. Especially if it had involved sneaking off to see Dean and giving him the things Sam and Adam had never gotten for themselves. Baseball games—who actually went to _baseball_ games? Even Sam had never managed to imagine his dad doing that when he thought about having a normal life.

Dean’s reaction to the Impala was not what Sam had expected, even though it served as further confirmation that this guy was who he said he was. He lectured Sam for fifteen minutes about proper maintenance, and then switched over to Adam when Sam didn’t show an appropriate level of shame or respect or whatever it was he was looking for. Finally Adam threw up his hands and told Dean that he was more than fucking welcome to do a tune-up, if it bothered him that much, while they went and worked on his mom’s disappearance.

“Actually, that’s not a bad idea,” Sam stepped back in. “We have experience with investigations, and maybe if you have something to do …” Objectively it was kind of dumb to leave a virtual stranger with their car, and the parts of its arsenal that weren’t presently stored on their persons, but the look in Dean’s eyes when he’d seen the Impala had been so much like Adam’s when their father had deigned to show up and drop some wisdom that Sam couldn’t help but want him to feel better. And if detailing the car was what did that, then Sam was going to call it a win-win.

Frankly, he was happy that Adam hadn’t suggested using Dean as bait for whatever might be out there. Even before Hell, Adam had been too willing to make sacrifices, like that poor girl Nancy in the Colorado jail. 

Sam never wanted the civilians to suffer—the grinding pain of so much loss, always coming in too late for the first victims, _stopping_ the problem never the same as making everything right, was the second worst thing about hunting, right behind not having any lives of their own. But knowing that Dean shared their blood ramped that up ten times. Sam didn’t want this to be a hunt. Someone in the family should get out without tragedy. 

Sam examined the pictures on the walls and shelves of the Milligan house with intense interest. Dad wasn’t in any of the pictures, the earliest of which showed a mother who looked like she was only old enough to be a babysitter, clutching young Dean and glaring into the camera with a fuck-you expression Sam had to respect. Maybe Dad had ditched her and left her with the overwhelming burden of a tiny little person (not that Sam was overidentifying or anything), but she was going to get the job done. Over the years the expression lightened some, but Dean had that same set to his jaw: I know what I’m doing, it said, and don’t you forget it.

Finally, in what had to be Dean’s old room, Sam found an album with a single picture of Dad, pressed in between two pictures of Dean and his mom alone as if Dean had decided that his mom didn’t need to see it. From the shirt Dad was wearing and Dean’s apparent age—about twelve—Sam guessed that this was from one of the times Dad had dropped them off at Bobby’s and disappeared. Dean was smiling, grin so wide it barely fit on his face, and holding a big cone of cotton candy. His lips were already blue. The background looked like some kind of county fair.

Sam stuffed the picture back into the album before Adam could see it. True, Adam was adept at ignoring evidence of Dad’s less-than-perfect fatherhood, but even he might have trouble swallowing the idea that this other kid, this safer kid, had gotten to see a part of Dad denied them because they had to be badass hunters.

When they found Dean’s mother’s ghoul-eaten body, Sam felt even better about keeping him out of the search. Dean himself had probably only been saved because he was living two towns over, visiting occasionally. 

****

Dean didn’t know what the fuck was going on. He thought he’d accepted Dad’s final abandonment years back. Maybe a part of him had _hoped_ that Dad was dead instead of just disappeared. Except not really; that was the kid in him, wanting to yell “then why don’t you _stay_ gone!” every time the old man dropped him off after one of his random visits. 

He had brothers, grown men, hand-raised by Dad, though that meant raised to some crazy itinerant life that wasn’t any good and that left them twitchy as tweakers. 

The ghouls they killed to prove to him that they weren’t crazy were real. Either that or he was having a nervous breakdown. Dean had never been much for worrying about his mental health; hell, he didn’t even care about his liver. Unbelievable as it sounded, he was going to accept their story until he got a better one. At least it explained some of Dad’s stranger gifts.

Adam seemed like a decent kid underneath the serial killer patina: young, dumb, and full of come. But every time he talked about their lives he was all about saving people from monsters, and Dean was hard pressed to imagine a more decent response to finding out that monsters were real. 

Sam was more of a puzzle. Those fox eyes were so friendly paired with that big dimpled smile, but Dean had the feeling that Sam was the one who found it easier to look at him and imagine just where to stick in the knife for the quickest possible takedown. Smart, too—full ride to Stanford, that was something special, even if it hadn’t worked out for him because of the same demon who’d killed his mom. (Demons! Even the preachers on the Rush Limbaugh channel didn’t really believe in demons, other than Democrats. There was a whole secret world under the regular world, darker and bloodier and more real. Crazy as it was, Dean still felt like something that had always been out of alignment in him had been wrenched into place. He _knew_ something worth knowing, for once.)

He’d always wanted a little brother or sister to take care of. He’d learned early on how to take care of himself, but that wasn’t the same thing at all. Teaching himself to make mac and cheese just meant he could fill his stomach while Mom was working; it wasn’t a _meal_. He’d wanted a family, even though he’d known that Dad wouldn’t be part of it. 

Brothers. Even in the middle of the worry and the shock, it felt like he’d solved a mystery. 

Better off without me, Dad had said to Mom once when he hadn’t known Dean had been listening. How could you think that? she’d asked, and he hadn’t said anything in answer. 

Dad was dead.

And then, so was Mom. 

****

Dean didn’t insist on looking closely at his mother’s corpse. No one should have to see that, as Sam knew intimately. 

“I need to see the rest,” he said, though, and Sam failed to talk him down from that. Civilians and bloody remains weren’t a good mix even in the absence of relatives, but Dean didn’t listen, and Adam didn’t back Sam up.

“Let him see,” Adam said, arms folded, challenging. Just because you’re miserable, Sam almost snapped at him—but who the fuck knew what was up with Adam, other than the _angel_ , and those thoughts were distressing enough that Sam decided to drop it. Dean was their family, and Sam guessed he deserved some insight into the family business.

So Dean went through the dark crawlspaces, into the places the ghouls had done their killings. He looked around, and he threw up, and then he came back out into the light. “You should have spent longer killing them,” he said.

****

There was two weeks’ worth of garbage sitting in his shithole apartment, a bunch of dirty laundry, and a casserole he’d meant to bring Mom when he finally got in touch with her. He kept thinking about going to get it, and then remembering that she wasn’t going to pretend to love his cooking ever again. 

It was like Dean’s brain had thrown a rod. The same fragmentary thoughts circled again and again. Mom. Dad. Monsters.

Was he supposed to call a funeral home? No, had to be the cops: she hadn’t gone in her sleep. What the fuck would he tell them? The only person he knew who could’ve answered questions like that for him was dead. Nobody in his cellphone was more than a drinking buddy, an easy mark, or a lay.

I have nothing, he thought.

I have brothers.

“I want in,” he said.

****

Sam should have expected Adam to take Dean’s side. Adam had only ever respected fighters. And, as distant as Adam was these days, the prospect of a new, better brother, one who didn’t see him as broken (even if he was) had to be attractive.

“If ghouls can figure out he’s a Winchester, so could anybody else,” Adam argued, looking through the extra guns for one that Dean could carry with reasonable ease.

“We can’t take him away from his life,” Sam hissed, even though Dean was standing close enough to the open trunk to hear, his arms crossed and his face so mulish it was easy to see the resemblance to Dad.

“What life?” Adam asked. He turned to Dean. “Let me guess,” he said, with that sharp intelligence that he too often hid, “you work five days a week, overtime if you can get it, and then you go out and get drunk and get laid. What are you doing to make the world a better place? What are you doing to save people?”

Dean stared at him like Adam had just cursed him out in Mandarin. 

“That’s not his job!” Sam interjected, before Dean could work up his own response. “You can’t ask someone to give up normal just because of … genetics, or even because something bad happened. He doesn’t owe us anything more than anyone else we help.”

“Yeah, and everyone else we help is a victim,” Adam said.

Dean snorted, and they turned to look at him. “This is how you help people?” Dean demanded, and for some reason he was glaring at _Sam_. He was flushed, wild-eyed, miles away from the sleazy charmer they’d met in the bar. “You crash into their lives and say, sorry, monsters under the bed are real, have a great life?” 

“Better than letting them die,” Adam snapped back, and how this got to be a three-way fight was unclear to Sam, though he should probably try to hang back and let Adam’s endless charm and winning personality drive Dean away. Dean could still get away from the Winchester heritage, even if he was on his own now. He was the kind of person they were supposed to protect, and apparently even Dad had agreed. But Adam wasn’t done: “If you want to hunt, you’re going to have to learn how to take care of yourself.”

Dean reached out, took the gun from Adam’s hand, ejected the clip, checked to make sure there wasn’t a round chambered, and handed it back. “Thanks,” he said, “but I’m pretty sure Dad had the gun part covered.” 

Sam breathed out—none of them were very rational right now, and he was just glad Dean hadn’t done anything else with the gun. “Okay!” he said, because grief and testosterone were never a promising combination. “How about we take a break, just for now. Nobody needs to make any life-altering decisions tonight.”

Dean glanced at his mother’s house. “I can’t stay here,” he said raggedly. Not six hours ago, he’d seen his mother’s corpse in there. Sam nodded, and even Adam looked like he understood.

“Come on,” Adam said. “You and Sam can double-bunk at the motel.”

They were used to grief; they just weren’t used to sharing the car. Sam should’ve been as antsy as he was every time Castiel came around, intruding into a part of his life that should’ve been just him and Adam. But somehow Dean’s presence wasn’t irritating in that way. Maybe it was only the lack of threats to Sam’s life and eternal soul. Dean looked out the window at nothing in particular while Sam drove, and Sam checked on him in the rear-view mirror every few minutes. Dean didn’t say anything, but the tears rolling down his cheeks meant he didn’t have to.

****

Dean dodged Adam’s half-hearted swing and brought his arm up to block the next strike. Adam shoved forward, using his weight to throw them both off balance, which worked even though Dean was bigger because Dean wasn’t expecting it. Dean managed to kick Adam’s leg out and roll free of the resulting crash to the floor, scrambling into a crouch.

Adam was, out of nowhere, holding a knife. His eyes were unfocused, and Dean’s stomach dropped with the realization that Adam might not be remembering that this was a practice bout right now.

“Hey,” he said, trying to make it as reassuring as possible through the pounding of his heart, “time out, okay?” He raised his hands, palms up, and didn’t stand to his full height.

Adam tilted his head. Dean had the eerie sense that he was drawing dotted lines in his head, figuring out where Dean’s joints would carve the best. Given the horror story they’d told him over the past few weeks, handing out details like they were state secrets, Dean didn’t think that was an exaggeration.

Dean swallowed and waited, keeping his eyes on Adam’s face, the way he would with an unfamiliar dog. He’d occasionally suspected Adam’s stories about things he’d killed to have been edited for greater gore, but right now he had no doubts.

Slowly, Adam’s knife hand drifted down, and then very quickly Adam flushed and returned it. Turned out, the knife had been in a back sheath, which Dean was going to find cool much, much later when his heart rate had returned to normal. “I could use a beer,” Adam said.

“You and me both,” Dean said heartily, and that was the end of the day’s training session. 

Much later, over the third or fourth beer (Dean was going to suggest switching to water any drink now), Adam admitted that he could get a little rough. “You gotta be ready to take some collateral damage,” he insisted, after a story about a hunt for a shtriga that had ended only after more children had died and Adam himself had nearly been taken, apparently because the shtriga recognized him as a previous near-victim.

“But how do you know when to hold out for a plan that isn’t going to get as many people killed?” Dean asked. He wasn’t an expert on things that went bump in the night like the Winchesters, but he’d seen a lot of his so-called friends growing up drift into crazy situations. If you weren’t careful you could convince yourself that, say, holding a bunch of meth for your boyfriend was simpler than saying no to him. If it was all just rushing at the nearest bad thing, then being a hunter seemed like a good way to talk yourself into getting killed.

Adam blinked at him uncomprehendingly. “Best way is always to hit it hard, hit it fast, and if it gets up hit it again.” He took another drink. “There was this guy once, Gordon Walker. All he cared about was killing monsters. Didn’t care a damn about saving people. Have to admit, I admired him. It was so simple for him. If he hadn’t’ve tried to kill Sam, I probably would’ve hooked up with him, let Sam go back to his safe little life.”

Dean frowned, though he couldn’t say why. “Adam?”

“What?” He sounded surly, already suspicious, and Dean wasn’t going to disappoint him.

“Why’d you make a deal for Sam’s life?” 

Adam didn’t storm off or lunge at Dean, but he did wait a while before answering. “Dad did it for me. He saved my life, and then Sam died and I had _nothing_. There was no reason for me to be alive.”

That’s fucked up, Dean thought, but decided not to share that wisdom. 

They drank some more. Then Adam told him how he was totally ready to fight to protect the seals, and how he didn’t have much choice anyway according to his angel, so he was going to suck it up like Winchesters always did. “Sam doesn’t think I can,” he confessed to his glass. “Ever since I came for him at Stanford—you know he asked if Dad was _letting_ me hunt on my own, when I was coming on hunts from the time I was eight? Sam was _twelve_ before he got to do that. But he still thinks I’m this helpless kid.”

Dude, you are a kid, Dean thought about saying. Also, Hell flashbacks? Pretty sure those aren’t recommended when you’re in the middle of a demon hunt. It was hard to imagine that Adam didn’t know that or would be helped by hearing it from someone else, though.

If having brothers meant this powerless feeling, wanting to fix things for them but incapable, then Dean needed to rethink the whole ‘I’ve found my missing piece’ thing.

“He’s worried about you because he cares,” Dean said instead.

“I guess so,” Adam acknowledged. “I just wish caring looked more like trusting.”

****

“Holy shit!” Dean enthused, bouncing around in the back seat enough that Sam thought about yelling at him to buckle the fuck up. “That was awesome!”

Adam chuckled in the passenger seat, even though he was bleeding in at least three places. “Gotta admit, the plan worked like a charm.”

“Like a charm that _shoots people_!” Sam pointed out. “We can’t get cocky just because we stopped one seal from breaking. There’s more where that came from, and Castiel doesn’t seem all that inclined to give us good intel on where to go next.”

Adam curled his lip but didn’t articulate any protest. It wasn’t as if Sam had the facts wrong there. Yes, they’d stuck a thumb in Lilith’s eye tonight, and Sam felt a warm glow from that, but they weren’t going to get away with sneaking into the basement and the top floor of a place and devil’s trapping demons from the outside all that often—or ever again, if Lilith’s minions showed any adaptability.

“Oh hey, Sammy,” Dean said, some of the energy leached from his voice. Before Sam could correct him on the name, he continued: “Do you have a towel handy? I think—” 

What Dean thought— _if_ Dean thought, on which Sam was reserving judgment—was lost when he passed out. And got blood all over the seat.

Clearly, there were some glitches to be worked out in this whole ‘adding another brother’ plan.

****

The way Sam told it to Dean, Mary Winchester had been a saint. His memories were all about hugs and macaroni and cheese and getting tucked in. If John had been around, Dean finally might have asked just how much better Mary had been in the sack than his mom—he’d expect to take a punch for that, but it would feel good to get off his chest. But John was dead, so the only way to learn any more about John’s wife was through his half-brothers.

When Dean was honest with himself, there was no way to expect a kid to know what about his mother had been so amazing that she’d stolen away his father from the woman he supposedly loved. Even if Mary had survived past their childhood, Sam and Adam couldn’t really have known what had happened between her and John. Dean hadn’t ever had a relationship longer than three nights himself, but he’d seen enough to understand that people were a fucking mystery.

The grief hit him every few days like a blown tire, usually when Adam was discussing some hapless victim of a ghost or vampire or other nightmare creature. Adam talked a lot about saving people, but they were always ‘people,’ faceless and nameless except when the names were useful to the hunt. He might be a great shot and a pretty good tactician, but Adam was about as sensitive as a brick wall. Sam, by contrast, seemed to have absorbed all the tact Adam had neglected, and he managed to change the subject every time Dean felt like he was going to punch Adam on behalf of the victims’ families.

“Thanks,” he said to Sam one night in Schenectady, when Sam had essentially picked Adam up and shoved him out the door to get food. One more word out of Adam about the case—the victims were working girls and he thought that deserved to be worked into every sentence he spoke—and Dean would’ve seen just how well his experience in bar brawls stacked up against Winchester paramilitary training.

Sam shrugged. “It’s kind of my fault he was never properly housetrained. I tried, but—”

“I don’t think that’s your fault,” Dean told him, making his shoulders relax by force of will and moving to sit at the small motel table.

Sam looked torn between defending John and agreeing. He sighed and joined Dean, facing him. His legs were so long that they overlapped Dean’s, one shoe brushing against Dean’s foot. Anybody else, Dean would have moved away from the touch, but it felt oddly right, so he stayed put. Sam leaned forward, sincere and tentative. “Our dad didn’t—I mean, did your mom ever tell him you’d been misbehaving and ask him to, I don’t know, talk to you man to man?”

This was the most direct Sam had ever been in asking for Dean’s stories about their father. Mostly he didn’t admit that he wanted to know the missing pieces, whereas Adam would actually ask, but then sulk afterwards. 

“She never knew when he was coming by,” Dean said. “And she didn’t really trust him to do anything like that. One time, on my birthday, he said he’d be back in the summer, and she kind of flipped out. Told him he didn’t get to make promises.”

Sam snorted, then looked ashamed. “Sorry—I just, I told him pretty much the same thing, when he told Adam how he’d make up for missing Adam’s twelfth birthday.”

Dean nodded. He wasn’t going to blame Sam for Adam’s douchiness, but he did admire Sam for trying. It couldn’t have been easy, taking care of another kid, constantly on the road, wondering what dangerous creature was going to try to kill them next. All the things that John should have been worrying about instead of his son.

Maybe the same drive that had made John leave Dean’s mom had pushed him to raise Adam and Sam in the hunting life. The funny thing was, John had kept secret the only thing that Dean might have respected about him: that he _did_ protect people, even if not his own family. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

Sam’s face screwed up, somewhere between amusement and dread. “Okay,” he said, but Dean could tell that he planned to lie if Dean asked anything uncomfortable.

“Did you ever forgive him?”

Sam took a minute to chew on that. His eyes were on his own hands, splayed on the table. Big hands, competent at anything Dean had seen him doing, from flashing ID like a real FBI agent to digging up graves. Sam looked up. His tip-tilted eyes were wide, like he was looking for answers too. “Most days? After Jess, and after Adam—I understood, a lot better. Once Adam made his deal, there was no way I could just go back to my life. Sometimes you need revenge.”

Revenge. Dean considered the concept. He didn’t get how dispelling ghosts and killing vampires had anything to do with revenge on a completely different demon, but then he hadn’t watched helplessly as his wife died. Hunting definitely counted as doing something—making a mark—and maybe that was close enough to revenge. Dean thought hunting would be awfully hard to enjoy, though, if it was always about punishing the supernatural.

Sam cleared his throat. “I, uh, just remembered. I need to run to the drugstore.”

Dean already knew that if he offered to do the errand instead, Sam would turn him down. And he knew that Sam wouldn’t come back carrying a bag, and that tonight Sam would curse and borrow Adam’s toothpaste again even though he always claimed it tasted disgusting. 

Dean wondered, not for the first time, if Sam was an addict. He’d known a couple of guys like that, on a downward slide but not at bottom. They thought that if they snuck off and didn’t talk about it, no one would notice. Sam didn’t seem high, though, and he slept about as much as Dean thought was normal. Dean _wanted_ to nag at him until he talked, but he didn’t want Sam to decide that he was a mistaken addition to the team.

“Don’t forget your toothpaste,” he said, instead of asking whether Sam was okay. He nudged Sam’s boot with his foot, trying to communicate that he was right there, if Sam needed him.

Sam smiled a little, but he left anyway, and came back long after dinner was cold.

****

Dean showed a lot more patience than Sam would have when Adam added about ten layers of completely unnecessary advice on the order of ‘watch Sam’s back’ to the mission parameters. In plain self-defense— _he_ was about to start yelling at Adam that they were all well aware of the plan—Sam finally suggested that they get the show on the road.

It was another seal, this one about to be broken by a tribe of vampires who, Castiel said, believed that they could get themselves declared overlords of humans in the coming upheaval. Sam doubted that ordinary demons played well with vampires, but Lilith did have a vampiric connection in the mythology, so it was impossible to discount that dystopic idea completely. Fortunately, the Winchesters (and Dean) were on the case.

They moved through the silent house like cat burglars, managing to decapitate five vampires before one of them moved just as Sam was bringing down his machete. The resulting screams turned the attack into a full-on fight. Dean yelled Adam’s name—not terror, but warning—and Adam’s grunt reassured Sam that he was still functioning as Sam and Dean fought their way down the hall towards the door with the runes on it, which had to be where the pack was storing the book Castiel had told them to retrieve. 

Dean had his back, panting and gleeful. For a newbie, he was shockingly good; Sam always knew exactly where he was even without looking, nothing like the Abbott and Costello routine that too often played out when Adam tried a trick he hadn’t warned Sam about. When two vamps jumped them at once, Sam leaned left and Dean leaned right and they took off the heads simultaneously. Sam had the distressing feeling that the manic grin on Dean’s face was matched by the one on his own. Even in the near darkness, Sam could see the whites of Dean’s eyes, wide with adrenaline. 

Adam joined them, one side of his face all blood, as if he’d sliced a vampire open only inches away from his head. He gave the all clear sign to indicate that the rest of the house had been pacified.

A heavy form dropped from the ceiling—another vampire—and Adam was down, vulnerable. Dean reacted before Sam could, grabbing the vampire’s hair and pulling it away from Adam’s neck. A quick slice and the body collapsed back onto Adam, while Dean flung the head down the hallway. “Strike!” Dean crowed, even as Adam cursed and fumbled himself out from under the dead weight of the body.

“Shh!” Sam said to them both. The edges of the doorway were starting to glow. 

Sam approached and dared to touch the knob; it wasn’t hot, and they probably didn’t have much time, so he grabbed it and yanked. No dice, and the door opened towards them, so kicking it down was also going to suck. He looked back, and Adam already had a fake credit card out. Sam spared a moment to be thankful for crappy interior doors, and then Adam popped the lock while Dean looked on with a frankly disturbing amount of admiration. 

And then Adam ripped open the door, instead of plastering himself on the side to make a smaller target, and charged right in. Sam followed immediately after, Dean hard on his heels.

The light was coming from an honest-to-God cauldron, bubbling like something out of a high school production of _Macbeth_. Five vampires turned towards them, snarling. 

Dean took a running jump and crashed feet-first into the cauldron, sending it tumbling. Sam had no time to spare to hope the contents weren’t poisonous; he was too busy killing vampires. 

The whole thing was over in about thirty seconds. Adam, for all his heedlessness, wasn’t going to let himself be taken out by a mere vampire, and Sam had visited Ruby last night and was fully capable of dealing with all five on his own if he’d needed to. Even Dean managed to get a last one as he regained his feet, and the witches’ brew wasn’t eating away at the floor, so Sam was tentatively calling this one a win.

They retreated to the car with the book, since there was the warm glow of victory and then there was standing around like idiots waiting for more bad guys to show up. Adam and Dean were trash-talking each other about who’d kicked more ass. Watching them, Sam felt like the oldest brother. Dean was sliding into this life like it had been waiting for him all along. Just like Sam had been waiting.

No, he didn’t—he couldn’t want that for Dean. He’d made his choice: he was going to kill Lilith. And if that cost him his family, old or new, then that just counted as protecting them. Dean shouldn’t _have_ to shine with joy at the end of a successful hunt.

“Hey,” Dean said, turning to Sam as Adam went to lock the book in the trunk. “What’s up, Debbie Downer?” The spray of blood that arced across his cheek was distracting. Sam knew it wasn’t demon blood. He knew vampire blood could do unknown damage. But that didn’t matter; he looked at those little dots, marring Dean’s freckles, and wanted to lick it off.

Okay, whoa. “Nothing,” he said, faster than he should’ve. “Just—let’s get this back to Castiel as soon as possible.” The anti-angel symbols had kept Castiel from joining them, but Sam was going to take his word that the book could be protected better from here on out.

But when Castiel came to them that night, he informed them that the angels had somehow let two more seals be broken while the humans were getting their part of the job done.

Sam had already suspected that it was going to be up to him to deal with Lilith. The angels didn’t have enough respect for humans, and they were showing themselves incompetent besides. He was doing the right thing—and if he had to keep secrets from Adam and Dean, well, he could use the distance anyway.

****

Winchesters were, Dean had decided, fucking weird. Which, look at their life: hard to say they hadn’t earned weird. Even their tattoos were weird. (They insisted that Dean wear a charm for the same anti-possession purpose, and Dean was happy to comply. He had no need to experience the supernatural from that side of the glass. Hell, he didn’t even like to ride shotgun in a car. Protecting his body from control by an evil being was worth a little jewelry.) Their weapons were just as strange—they had knives that had been tempered in blood, and stakes made from the wood of extinct trees, and those were only for the _common_ baddies, according to Sam.

Sam sneaking off at all hours, though, and Adam with an angel literally on his shoulder, those were the crunchy bits at the top of the salad of bizarre. Neither of those seemed like they’d end well, especially once Adam admitted (half blitzed—Dean knew a few tricks of his own about how to get a man to talk) that he knew Sam was going to hang out with a demon, even if he wasn’t too clear on the whys.

Dean hadn’t met Ruby and wasn’t keen on changing that. Sam’s own description was light on the positive characteristics, other than keeping him alive while Adam was (weird!) in Hell for four months. And, from what Dean inferred, a mouth like a Hoover, but that was more an undercurrent than anything that got said aloud. 

Castiel, on the other hand, popped up like a fifteen-year-old’s hard-on: often and inconveniently. Sam was clearly nervous around him, and also felt that he should be grateful given that the dude saved his brother from Hell (plus was an angel of the Lord: Dean himself had never seen much to make him think that God gave a soft fart what people did, but Sam seemed to think that counted for something in itself). Adam was freaked by Castiel’s presence, which showed that he was a human being after all and not a killing machine, and Adam was also kind of pleased to be chosen for something, which said an awful lot about his daddy issues that Dean of all people was not going to touch.

Castiel, for his part, stared at Dean as if Dean were a bomb with an unknown timer. “I have no objection to him as such,” was how he’d said it to Sam and Adam. “He is certainly no abomination, as Sam is. However, he is both unfamiliar with our situation and untrained. He is a liability.”

“Hey!” Dean had said, more upset on Sam’s behalf than his own. The angel was probably telling the truth about him, but calling Sam names just because he’d been fed blood as a baby, that was Old Testament sins-of-the-fathers shit, and it wasn’t _fair_.

Adam had intervened with some line about finding a prophet, but the issue was unresolved. Dean did his best to help out with the research, and he was getting better at the hand-to-hand, even though Sam could put him down without breaking a sweat. 

Sometimes—usually when things were quiet, when Dean and Sam were sharing a breakfast of Egg McMuffins and coffee and Adam was doing whatever he did instead of eating and sleeping—Dean looked over the table at Sam and felt, crazily, that he was exactly where he needed to be. As fucked-up and tragic as Sam’s life had been, Dean couldn’t shake the idea that everything before this had brought them together, and that had to mean something.

Sam made Dean’s heart beat erratically just looking at him. Objectively, that could’ve been fear—Sam could probably bench-press a VW bug, and his eyes said he was just one bad day away from picking up an ax and going full Lizzy Borden—but he also wanted to pin Sam down and hear everything about him. It was like there was a downed electric cable between them, sparking erratically.

Other times, Dean thought Sam saw him as a babysitter for Adam, or vice versa. Never more so than on the mornings after Sam had snuck off and Adam had pretended to sleep through it. Sam would suggest some “training” that coincidentally would require Adam to concentrate on Dean, not quite managing to avoid condescending to both of them whenever Dean showed improvement in his ability to throw a knife or remember an exorcism. Adam kept his reactions close to his chest. Dean had the sense that he thought that complaining, or at least complaining to Dean, would be a betrayal of Sam. But every time Castiel popped up, he got even edgier. Their secrets were like some still-undiscovered sibling, another ghost in the car.

****

Sam was beginning to see the merit in adding Dean to their screwed-up family, even if he couldn’t understand why Dean wanted this life. When Adam wasn’t sulking or mooning over the angel, he was training Dean, which was probably the best thing for his self-esteem and also meant that he wasn’t constantly getting in Sam’s face about Sam’s search for Lilith. Sam didn’t blame Adam for having lost his taste for demons, but at the same time, the seals were breaking; someone needed to get the job done. And Dean wasn’t a bad extra body to have around for difficult hunts. Not that Sam had opinions about Dean’s body, of course. Just—he wasn’t having trouble learning the lore, that was all.

Nonetheless, Sam was initially dubious of Dean’s suggestion that they broaden their set of allies. “Somebody who’s not stuck in this by blood,” Dean said. Carefully focusing on the text in front of him, he continued, “Somebody who isn’t all up in your family issues.” Which, Sam had to admit, put Bobby out of the running, since Sam still treated him too much like Dad’s surrogate (after all, John Winchester would probably have put a shotgun in his own face if he could’ve).

“That’s a short list,” Adam said from his position by the window. Half in shadow, his face didn’t show how exhausted he was, but Sam could still see it in the slump of his shoulders.

“Hey, I had a short booty call list back home,” Dean argued, “but I got laid whenever I wanted.”

Sam couldn’t help glancing over at Adam to see if he’d share Sam’s eyeroll, but no luck. “Moving on,” Sam said, trying not to be irritated. 

“Seriously?” Dean slammed his book closed—Sam winced on behalf of the cracking binding—and stood up. “We’re driving around the country with our thumbs up our asses, all we get from the angel is threats, and you don’t think we could use a few new ideas? Worst that happens, your friends got nothing.”

Well, there was that one time Gordon Walker tried to kill Sam and recruit Adam as his Boy Wonder, but even Sam had to admit that Walker wouldn’t ever have been on their list of trusted contacts. As long as they didn’t mention Ruby, there wasn’t too much risk. And Sam was so tired of having to make all the plans. Maybe he could let Dean take the lead, just this once.

“We could try the Harvelles,” Sam allowed. Dean smirked—Sam suspected that he wanted to say something about how they should listen to their big brother, but maybe he was just projecting—and celebrated his victory by demanding that he be allowed to drive the Impala. Since Adam was hungover and Sam wasn’t in the mood to puncture Dean’s enthusiasm, he got his time behind the wheel, and celebrated by refusing to listen to anything except for AC/DC on repeat.

Ellen’s new place was another bar, this time in a little Illinois town. Sam didn’t ask how she’d taken it over, but the place was clearly a long-time local favorite, and they had to wait a while for things to clear out enough to talk. Dean and Adam used the opportunity to do some quality drinking. Sam got a bottle just to be sociable, but he was waiting for a different kind of rush. His flask was nearly empty. He’d call Ruby afterwards.

When Dean went to the bathroom, by way of an extended conversation with Jo behind the bar, Sam leaned forward. “Still think this was a good idea?” he asked, hoping that Adam would show some enthusiasm, or, fuck, some passionate resistance. _Anything_ that wasn’t angel-related or stop-hiding-shit from him would be a good sign.

“I think Jo has a crush,” Adam said, a little sourly. 

Sam knew Adam’d had a bit of a crush of his own, once upon a time, before he’d gotten too busy chasing Sam’s possessed ass down, burying their father, and selling his soul. “I don’t think Jo could ever really respect a man who wasn’t a hunter,” Sam offered.

Adam slurped mournfully at his beer. “A, I’m pretty sure Dean thinks he is now. B, I’m also pretty sure that ‘respect’ is not what she wants to do to him.”

Sam shrugged; fair points. “Of course, it’d be kind of funny to see what Ellen would do to some older guy sniffing around her baby girl.”

“I think Dean’s into _Ellen_ ,” Adam said, sounding even more depressed, probably because if there was anyone who could pull that off it probably was Dean. Dad’s charisma and looks with none of the Winchester trauma: yeah, Sam thought, if he were Ellen he’d hit that until candy came out.

That was an inappropriate thought, Sam realized and put his beer down. “Okay,” he said, loud enough that Adam’s head jerked up, “I’m gonna hit the head.”

He’d text Ruby. Their motel was only half a mile away. He could meet her there, maybe get another room just for the hour.

****

Ellen Harvelle was _awesome_. Just scary enough that Dean didn’t put the moves on her outright, even though it had been almost a month since he’d gotten any (not counting that handjob at the service station in Ohio, which Dean didn’t since he wasn’t sixteen any more). But more than being terrifying, she knew at least as much about the supernatural as Sam and Adam did, and she wasn’t family, so he could actually ask some of his more delicate questions. 

Like: what’s up with the demons hanging around Sam? Did Adam deserve to go to Hell? He’d heard the Winchester version of events, but that was kind of like reading _USA Today_ when he needed a college textbook instead. And of course Sam fucked off before the bar even closed, doing whatever it was that Sam did when he disappeared, leaving an increasingly antsy Adam to alternate between frowning into his beer and half-heartedly hitting on Jo. 

Finally, Ellen tossed the stragglers out, sent Jo to get a couple of books out of storage, and set Adam up with a leather-bound book the size of his torso that supposedly told the truth about angels. Then she took Dean back out to the bar “to get acquainted; I already know _your_ problems, boy” (the look on Adam’s face when she said that to him was priceless). There, she confirmed enough of the basic facts to reassure Dean that, though everything else was crap, Sam and Adam hadn’t full-on lied to him the way they lied to the normal people they encountered on a case. 

Not that Dean didn’t respect a good lie. He wasn’t exactly an upstanding citizen, even before Mom died. He could keep a legit job for a while, especially one that involved customer service, _especially_ one with a slightly older female clientele, but he always found some way to screw it up for himself. He’d get drunk and then show up, visibly lit; he’d skip out for three days straight and blow all his money at some casino; he’d screw the owner’s teenage kid (they were always legal, though, since he was eighteen—no way was he going to end up in jail over a fuck). He knew he’d been a disappointment to his mom. Hunting was the first time in his life that the things he could do well outweighed the things he was a fuck-up at, and it felt good.

“So,” he said, when Ellen had finished explaining how she saw the whole Hell-Lilith-Lucifer-heavenly host struggle, “you gonna tell me to get out and live my life as long as I can, ‘cause this isn’t my job?”

Ellen poured another shot of whiskey and pounded it down, wiping her mouth off with the back of her hand in a move that had Dean shifting on his stool. “It shouldn’t oughta be anybody’s job,” she said plainly. “But it is. You seem like a grown man—” she put a hand up before Dean could take advantage of that line—“and honestly, those boys need all the help they can get. Without their daddy, they’ve been tugging in different directions so long I don’t think either of them knows how to stop.”

Dean rolled his own shotglass between his palms, watching the overhead lights refract through the thick glass onto the scratched wood of the bar. “I just don’t know what an ordinary person can _do_. Hell, I’ve seen what a hunter can do to a ghost, or a vampire, and I believe there’s ways to hunt all these things I didn’t believe in three months ago. But angels? Demons from out of the Bible? I don’t know if there _is_ a pay grade for that.” 

“Only one way to find out,” Ellen said, not unsympathetically.

Dean chuckled. “Guess so,” he said, and went to see whether Adam had learned anything from the Big Book of Angels.

****

The night’s motel was only a couple of blocks away from a Wal-Mart (or a Wal-Mart parking lot, anyway), and Dean used the opportunity to shop for actual groceries. 

“Get me a medium knife,” Dean ordered when he had various green and brown things laid out on the tiny kitchenette counter. “And grab one for yourself, while you’re at it.”

“You’re seriously going to cook with our knives?” Adam said, saving Sam the trouble.

Dean turned and gave them a huge, shiteating grin, the kind that crinkled his eyes up and made Sam want to hunch his shoulders and look away before he did something dumb, like blushing or forgetting his own name. “Dude, you clean those knives like you’re about to perform surgery with them.” And occasionally have, Sam didn’t add. It was a good point, and Adam didn’t have another argument in reserve, so (after an impromptu wrestling match from which Sam emerged righteously triumphant) Adam went and got the knives. But somehow Sam ended up the sous-chef, and worse than that, Dean seemed to think that calling him ‘Sammy’ was fully justified despite or maybe because of how annoying the nickname was. Sam kept resolving not to respond to it, and then realizing that he’d just complied with yet another instruction, like the world’s worst Simon Says player.

He didn’t really mind. Dean made a huge salad, with creamy chunks of avocado and onions he’d fried himself, along with sweet peppers and spinach and sunflower seeds. He made a roast, explaining the process as he went as if making sure Sam could do it for himself next time. By the time he got it out of the oven, Sam was about ready to eat Dean’s arm—but the roast was a hell of a lot better, and the salad was so good that Adam only bitched for a minute about having to eat his serving before getting more meat.

In fact, Adam ate two plates full. Then he went outside to sit on the hood of the Impala, which seemed like the least damaging brooding he could do, so Sam didn’t attempt to fight it.

The whole process seemed so exotic to Sam: being able to take a bunch of raw ingredients and turn them into actual food. Even in college, he’d lived out of the dining hall, which while more nutritious and abundant than the food he’d scrounged on the road was still prepared for him. He’d never managed to do more than heat up soup out of cans for Adam. 

“Did your mom teach you how to cook?” he asked while Dean was using a roll to mop up the last of the juices.

Dean stiffened for a moment, then smiled, soft and remembering. “Kind of. She got me halfway, and then when I moved out, I watched a lot of cooking shows. When I’d visit, I’d bring her scalloped potatoes or spinach with raisins and pine nuts or something like that. No matter how it turned out, she always said she loved it.”

“The spinach sounds delicious,” Sam said, wistful. Adam would laugh and laugh, but he’d eat it up if he got the chance, Sam bet. At least, if he was eating anything that day instead of just drinking his calories.

“Maybe I’ll make it for you some time,” Dean said, with that same distant hopefulness, like they were talking about winning the lottery. Sam didn’t like that Dean was starting to see how dead-end their lives were. But he couldn’t change that. 

So he did what he could: “I could eat ten pounds of this, it’s so good,” he said, and swallowed another forkful. Dean smiled, proud of himself. Right then, Sam didn’t need to worry about that night’s appointment with Ruby or the next seal or what Lilith was planning to throw at them. He’d been hungry, and now he was fed; Adam was nearby; and Dean was sitting across from him, safe and sound.

I could live this life, he thought.

Then his cell buzzed, letting him know Ruby had arrived, and he made his excuses, trying not to notice how Dean’s face fell and telling himself it was only because he’d been a jerk and stuck Dean with the dishes.

****

Adam woke from one of his nightmares insisting that Dean needed an anti-possession tattoo, right the fuck now. Dean saw his point, even woozy in the middle of the night, but he was grateful to Sam for talking Adam into waiting until daylight.

When they actually went to the tattoo shop, Adam declined to watch Dean get inked—we watch each other bleed enough at our day job, he’d told Sam—and went instead to drink and/or hang out with Castiel. “I’m not sure which one I want the intervention for,” Sam said morosely after explaining why Adam wasn’t going to be joining them.

“Is it really that bad? Castiel seems pretty serious about protecting Adam,” Dean said. ‘Protecting’ was one word for it, but Dean wasn’t going to say the others to Sam, who was already possessive. Not that Dean had the high ground there. He was finding that he didn’t like having Sam out of his sight either, since being a hero and getting your ass kicked on a regular basis seemed to be overlapping experiences. 

Sam looked at the flash decorating the walls as if searching for an answer. “Castiel treats Adam like he wasn’t ever in Hell,” he said at last. “He expects too much.”

Dean was at a disadvantage here, never having known Adam before Hell (so very fucking weird). From what he’d seen, Adam could pull it together when a fight was at hand, even though he did spend a lot of time pickling his bad memories. Measuring by the ability to save innocent lives, Adam was way ahead of Dean, so being technically the older brother didn’t give Dean enough credibility to tell him to shape up. 

He was grateful when the tattoo artist showed up, because he didn’t have to think about how he was failing to carry his weight on the team. “First tattoo?” the girl asked incuriously, looking at his bared chest with a clinical eye (though she did melt a little when he broke out the I-think-you’re-super-cute smile; he still had it). 

Dean nodded, and she leaned forward a bit, letting him look at the edges of the elaborate Japanese-style scene that showed over her tank top. “It hits people differently. If you’re gonna throw up, let me know. Otherwise, just keep your mouth shut.”

That puzzled him a bit, until she finished the ticklish business of placing the design and began the real needlework. It hurt, bone-deep, and he had to stay still for it, and before she’d finished the first point of the star the pain had become something very different.

Sam was watching him, watching the blood bead up on his skin, flinching with him every time the girl wiped some away, her gloved hands confident as she pushed the ink so far into him it couldn’t be removed. Dean tried to control his breathing, or at least not to make sex noises, but Sam was watching him like he was the main attraction at a strip joint and he’d just gotten rid of his G-string. 

He was joining them. Now they’d all have the same sign, almost better than sharing the same name. The tattoo was like a secret sheriff’s star: a vow to protect the innocent. 

God, the pain was good, a low buzz that filled him up, like she was putting the needle into every inch of his skin at the same time. He gripped the armrests with all his strength and concentrated on not humping the air, just letting it happen.

Sam’s eyes were dark, giving nothing away as he focused on the tattooist’s work. Dean wasn’t sure he was blinking. Dean himself was sweating, his bones like lead inside him. 

The pain varied as she moved over his flesh, alternately hot and cool as the waves of sensation flowed through him. Sam’s hands were clenched on his knees, the veins on the backs of his hands standing out with tension, as if he was feeling the echoes from when he’d gotten his own tattoo. His expression had the same concentration as when he was tracking down a scrap of information about Lilith.

“Not much longer,” the girl said, and Dean nearly wrenched himself out of the chair; he’d forgotten she was there, and not just a line of fire moving across his skin. Sam took a deep breath and leaned forward, as if he was worried that she might get the last bit wrong if he wasn’t standing guard.

Dean was sure Sam must approve of how good he was being, not moving or crying out. He’d spent the first part of his life getting wasted and running from any kind of responsibility, but that was done now. And when Dean jerked off, later, with the tattoo carefully covered with plastic wrap and tape, he thought only about the buzz of the needle and the pressure on his skin.

****

Sam had a lot of time to review how he got here, sitting in the hospital chair Castiel had vacated next to his brother’s bruised, weary body. 

The memories were blurred together in his mind: the yellow-eyed man forcing him to drink from his wrist, the shock of fire as his mother screamed, the weight of Adam as Sam carried him out of the house, all starting a nightmare that had lasted twenty years. He’d left for Stanford never having told Adam about the blood. Dad’s rages when he’d mentioned it, before he’d learned better, had been epic. Adam had always known about the nightmares, though; how could he not, when Sam woke him up half the time? But it had taken Sam months after Jess died to admit even to himself that the dreams with her face had been premonitions. Telling Adam about his visions had been the hardest thing he’d done to that point, worse than disowning Dad and leaving.

The only thing that he’d had that wasn’t freaky psychic powers and a knife collection was being Adam’s brother. The one who always knew more and got there first. Admitting his willful blindness and his freakshow nature to Adam had been almost unmanning.

And look what good it had done: Adam convinced that it was his turn to take care of Sam, combining the toxic brew of his depression over Dad’s death with his determination to prove himself as hunter, protector, savior. Sam had sent Adam to that crossroads, Sam had failed to keep him out of Hell, and Sam hadn’t told the angels to fuck themselves when they came for his brother.

The soft knock at the door brought him away from thoughts that circled darkly around ‘stayed dead.’ Dean’s expression was apologetic, but he held out one of the cups he was carrying. 

The coffee turned out to be half milk and another quarter sugar, and Sam was guessing that it was decaf, but it still felt good. There was a jackhammer pounding away at his right temple, but despite the fact that Alastair had been a major demon, the pain was no worse than it had been with the last few regular ones he’d pulled. 

Dean pulled up another chair beside him, close enough that they were knee to knee. In his drugged, catheterized sleep, Adam looked like an overstressed college student, too thin and too pale but no real signs of the deeper suffering. 

“I should’ve told him not to do it,” Dean said, after a while. 

Sam snorted. “Yeah, Castiel would’ve loved that.”

“Would he really smite me? I’m—” he cut off what was probably going to be something like ‘a real human,’ and though that was probably out of respect for Sam it only highlighted that Sam was _different_. Dean didn’t look at him like he was a monster, though. Dean didn’t even look at him like Adam did: loved but not trusted, like Adam’s trip through Hell and conversations with angels meant that Adam was better than he was. Dean looked at Sam like he was just as confused at how they’d ended up here as Sam was. He’d followed Sam into that torture chamber without question, when Sam said he needed to help Adam. Dean had believed in him, and not just because he wanted something like Ruby did.

Dean shifted in his chair, his beat-up jacket crunching a little (Sam had the uncomfortable suspicion that it was still covered with demon blood, but he already knew that the stuff lost its power dried up). “Some days I feel like I’m the only one who sees how nuts this all is. An angel needs a torturer? A demon wants to save the world? I keep thinking we should just … dump it all. Take you and Adam and—go fishing.”

“Like you did with Dad,” Sam said, knowing it was just the wrong thing even as it came out of his mouth. Shit, he needed Ruby. Just a few minutes, not even a fuck afterwards, just to get his head clear. 

Dean flicked a glance at him, then seemed to decide that Sam wasn’t really interested in a fight. “Dad never really knew what questions to ask when he came around,” he said, staring down at his hands. “We could—get a cabin, hole up there and learn all the stuff that most brothers know already.”

“What makes you think Lilith and the angels would let us go?” Sam asked out of idle curiosity. Dean was new to vengeance, and the ghouls who’d killed his mother were dead besides. He didn’t burn for payback like Sam did.

Dean hesitated, then reached out for Adam’s slack hand, like it would somehow give him strength. “If they didn’t need humans, they wouldn’t be after you so hard. Angels need consent, and it sure seems like the demons must need something like that, or you’d be dead five times over—and not coming back,” he added quickly before Sam could interrupt with a recap. “So, I say fuck ‘em. Quit. I can’t see how we win, playing their game.”

For some reason, Sam’s mind went to his nearly empty flask. “It’s too late for that,” Sam said.

Dean looked like he wanted to say more. His eyes were on Adam. “I always wanted brothers. I just didn’t know … how much it would hurt, when you got hurt. I feel like, I should be taking the hits. But I can’t, and I hate it.”

Sam swallowed against the heaviness in his chest. “For what it’s worth,” he said, “it means a lot that you want to.” Maybe he didn’t really believe that right now—there was too much rage in his head, too many exorcisms undone—but he knew Dean deserved to hear it.

****

Astonishingly, things got _worse_ after the angels fucked Adam over —whose bright idea was it to take a torturer whose experience was on not-really-real, Hell-resurrected bodies and have him try it out on a possessed human, anyway?—and Adam and Sam had another knock-down fight, this one not about any particular aspect of their situation so much as it was about everything.

Dean had been thinking that Sam’s distrust of Castiel was mostly weird envy (of Adam’s divided attention, of Castiel’s success getting Adam out of Hell when Sam failed, of Heaven’s apparent favoritism for Sam’s little brother when Sam was stuck palling around with demons just because of something that happened when he was a toddler). But he’d started to share Sam’s suspicions. For one thing, anyone with a brain, much less four wings and the face of a lion, could tell that just giving Sam orders without any reasons why was the fastest way to get him to head in the opposite direction, especially when that direction was towards some hot chick promising him that he could be a hero. Dean also found it hard to believe that Sam’s demon fuckbuddy wanted to save the world. So, if the angels _didn’t_ want an apocalypse, they had an awfully funny way of showing it.

And then they brought a little girl into the whole mess. Castiel took her—consent was a joke when it came to a girl missing her father, and Dean ought to know—and used her. Just as a side note, they found out that Sam wasn’t just getting demon strange, he was drinking demon blood, because they didn’t have nearly enough shit to wade through already.

Sam was too out of it to notice when they locked him in Bobby Singer’s panic room, but Dean was pretty sure Adam thought this was worse than Hell. He’d looked better lying in his hospital bed after Alastair’s beatdown.

Dean hadn’t ever felt as strong a tug towards Adam as to Sam—and what that said about him, more in tune with a demon blood junkie than with Heaven’s chosen warrior, he didn’t want to think about—but that didn’t mean he was okay with his half-brother suffering. Bobby took the bottle of Jack away from Adam before the kid got more than a quarter of the way through, but then scrutinized the both of them and disappeared, as if telling Dean: this is your family business, you fix it. 

As clueless as Dean felt, there was something kind of nice about the idea that their shared blood gave Sam and Adam an obligation to listen to him. He was the oldest, after all, and the least fucked-up (even if you only went by police records, those couple of drunk and disorderlies notwithstanding).

“I can’t say I have any clue what’s gonna happen,” he settled on at last. “And I know I’m not the same as Sam. You two, what you’ve been through, I can’t pretend to understand it. But I’m here. I’m your family and I’m here.”

Adam blinked at him a couple of times. “Dad shoulda told us,” he said thickly. “I probably woulda dragged you into this shitshow, just like I dragged Sam back in, but—I wish I’d known.”

“Yeah,” Dean said, and then Adam slumped back into Bobby’s couch. After a couple of minutes of silence, Dean dared to cross the room and shake out a blanket over Adam’s dazed body. Dean himself thought about checking on Sam, but he was guessing he’d be even less welcome there. So he went into the spare room Bobby’d shown him earlier and tried to get some shut-eye.

And then Sam was gone, and Adam hared off after him without even waiting for Dean, and Dean realized why Sam said he couldn’t quit: because waiting for the world to end was worse than losing the fight to save it.

****

Sam told himself that Adam couldn’t get the job done, that it didn’t matter what happened to him, because Dean was there for Adam now. Sam told himself that there was always going to be collateral damage, and that it was the fault of the demon for possessing the nurse and not his own. Adam said that he was a monster, and Adam would know. But that was a price he’d already decided to pay.

Lilith had to die, and Sam was the one to do it.

Only it didn’t work out that way, and all of a sudden he was on a plane with Adam, fleeing from the thing he’d done.

****

Dean watched from a distance as the two of them talked across a picnic table, both slump-shouldered. Adam offered Sam the keys to the Impala. Sam shook his head. Sam looked over at Dean and his face changed, another small collapse.

“I’m leaving,” he said as soon as he reached Dean. “You can’t trust me, and neither can I.”

“Don’t go,” burst out before Dean could think about it, but Sam just shook his head. “Sammy—” Dean tried, about to offer to come with him and hold his hand through the shakes.

“I need you to take care of Adam,” Sam interrupted, edging closer, his fingers twisting in the strap of his pack.

“Who’s going to take care of you?” Dean asked, leaning in further himself.

Sam shrugged. “I can’t hunt, and he can’t stop. Please, Dean.”

Sam’s eyes were so—Dean wanted to look away, and he wanted to stay here forever. _I’m going to kiss him_ , he thought distantly, and felt himself moving towards Sam like every cell in him was magnetized.

Somehow, Sam turned Dean’s lunge into a hug. Dean’s arms came up automatically, and he hid his face in Sam’s shoulder, shaking with terrible and epically mistimed want.

Sam’s breath was hot and wet along his neck. “Promise me, please.” His voice was unsteady, and if he had an equal yearning, maybe that was _worse_. Lucifer walked the earth and Sam was a demon blood addict. What Dean wanted, however bad, was irrelevant.

“Okay, Sam,” Dean made himself say, and then made himself loosen his grip, which felt more like peeling his skin off. He turned to see Adam staring at the two of them, and wondered how much of that had shown.

When he turned back, Sam was already halfway to the road. _Wait_ , he wanted to call out. _How can this be a good idea?_ But if he stayed around Sam, he didn’t know if he’d be able to control himself, and Sam had made him give his word.

“You coming?” Adam called, and Dean followed him.

****

Sam quitting being a Winchester didn’t mean that being a Winchester quit him. Lucifer’s tender ministrations—not to mention the hunters who wanted to get him high and somehow use that to gank Lucifer—made it crystal clear that Sam didn’t get to leave the game in the fourth quarter, the way maybe he could’ve done if he’d listened to Dean not too long ago.

He wouldn’t say he was _pathetically_ grateful that Adam called and wanted him back. _Manageably_ grateful, okay. And he could deal with whatever was going on between him and Dean. At least it made a distraction from Lucifer wanting his body. 

Of course, being back together didn’t mean being in perfect harmony, any more than it ever had. “Your plan sucks,” Dean said flatly as they discussed what to do with the newly reacquired Colt. “You think we’re just gonna walk right up to Lucifer and put a bullet through his brain?”

“We know where he’s gonna be, and we’ve got as big a team as we’re likely to get,” Sam argued right back.

Dean was proved disastrously right when they arrived in Carthage. How the fuck Meg and her hellhounds were on Lucifer’s side if Lucifer planned to exterminate all the demons was a puzzle, but not one they had any time to figure out. Jo got clawed up bad saving Dean, who’d never faced hellhounds before and couldn’t seem to figure out where to aim.

“She needs a hospital,” Dean said when they’d gotten to momentary safety in an abandoned hardware store. The rest of them knew that she didn’t have much of a chance even if they’d had a medivac right there, but nobody told Dean.

There were enough supplies in the hardware store to build a bomb that would put even a hellhounds down. They just needed someone to keep the hellhounds focused on the building. “You go,” Jo told the Winchesters. “I’m not getting out of this, so I’ll stay here and distract the hounds.” 

Sam hated it, but her sacrifice wouldn’t be in vain.

“Fuck that noise,” Dean said. “How about we let the guy who can _run_ trigger the thing, _after_ Ellen’s gotten Jo into the car. I’ll cover them. You guys build the damn bomb while we’re at it.”

Ellen and Sam shared a long moment. Ellen’s eyes said everything that needed saying: if there was any chance at all, she was taking it, and the bomb was only a two-man job. “Fine,” Sam decided.

Sam didn’t see Dean use his newfound knowledge of how hellhounds looked when they moved, but he did hear the car start, and Dean made it back inside only bleeding in a couple of places.

“You’ll have ten seconds, max,” Sam warned, and hoped it would be that much—amateur bomb-making was a dicey proposition at the best of times, which this was not.

Dean nodded, and Sam and Adam headed out to confront Lucifer.

****

So the Colt was a huge disappointment, more to Sam and Adam than to Dean since Dean had never seen it work its magic. Dean thought that watching it kill the yellow-eyed demon who’d fucked up their family had probably made it seem invincible. Yes, he was bummed too: Lucifer, wholesale slaughter of humanity, and so on. 

But Dean hadn’t blown himself up, which had sure seemed like the most likely outcome when he’d been holding that patched-together trigger. And Ellen had good news, or what counted as good news for them: Jo nearly bled out on the way to the hospital, and her heart stopped twice during emergency surgery. She was down to one kidney and would need months of rehab. But she was going to be okay. “Surgeon came in talking about plastic surgery so the scar wouldn’t be so ugly,” Ellen said on the phone, the pride radiating across state lines, “and she said no man who was afraid of who she was deserved a moment of her time.”

“Tell her I’m sorry,” Dean said. If he’d known what he was doing, she wouldn’t have had to come rescue him in the first place. She’d been doing fine until she’d gotten distracted saving his ass.

“Shut your mouth,” Ellen told him. “A friend’s in trouble, you go help ‘em. Jo was raised right, and so were you.”

It wasn’t absolution. Dean still owed Jo, and he was going to fight twice as hard so that he wouldn’t get someone else hurt again. But knowing that Ellen didn’t judge him harshly was a huge relief. “Thanks,” he said.

Ellen made an exasperated sound. “Didn’t I say to shut your mouth? Now you go find those two boys and make sure they haven’t drunk themselves blind.” She hung up without saying goodbye.

Dean suspected that, had he been there in person to proposition Ellen right then, she might’ve taken him up on the offer. What a night that would’ve been. It was probably for the best that she was a hundred miles away, though. The last thing he needed was another complicated relationship.

****

When they’d found out that they’d been created to host Lucifer and Michael, like matching socks, Sam hadn’t even been very surprised. Of course they’d have jobs to do, assigned to them like Dad giving each of them a list of chores. God’s assignment just had one item for each of them, but it was a doozy. The extra information, though—Heaven’s role in breaking up Dad and Dean’s mom—that was not a good reveal.

“Your mom and dad were a real coup,” the cupid said. It—he—was _proud_. Dean’s fists clenched. 

“So they weren’t really in love?” Adam asked, sounding lost, like _this_ of all the shit that had happened to them was too much. 

“Oh no, not at all,” the cupid said. “What we do is real. Absolutely real. It’s just not chosen, but then what love ever is? In John Winchester’s case, there was some other woman he loved, so that was a fiddly bit, but overall it was extremely well executed. And you certainly turned out well!”

Which was when Dean punched him.

As it turned out, the cupid wasn’t even the problem: it was Famine. Sam understood why they locked him up, even if it turned out to be a dumb idea when that left him trussed up for the demons.

He’d just finished drinking the last one when Dean burst back into the motel room.

“Where’s Adam?” Sam demanded.

Dean shook his head. “Still waiting for Cas to take care of business in between burgers. I—I had to see you.” He moved closer, not reacting to the blood on Sam’s chin. His eyes were gleaming, his skin flushed. He looked like he’d been working himself up to an important confession. 

He’s infected, Sam realized. 

Dean put his hand on Sam’s arm. Sam could feel the heat of him even through his jacket and shirt. Blood always made him horny, now. Ruby had trained him to expect it, like a dog hearing Pavlov’s dinner bell. That was the _best_ explanation he could offer for how his heart rate was speeding and his dick was starting to thicken. 

Dean took a deep breath, his ridiculous lashes dipping. He was sweating, nervous, and Sam wanted to tell him it was okay despite everything. “If I could just—maybe just once, you know?”

Sam knew there was no ‘just once’ with this, even without Famine’s interference. The demon blood had dulled the current he felt running between them, the sense that they were just a few steps away from snapping into perfect alignment. But with Dean’s hand on him, it was hard to remember what they were supposed to be to each other. Without meaning to, he’d drifted closer, so that Dean’s head was now tilted back, looking up into Sam’s eyes. Almost perfectly positioned to be kissed.

He was covered in blood. He was drinking demon blood, and he was about to get it all over Dean, who deserved so much better than this—who was under a compulsion.

Ignoring the pounding heat that wanted to drive him forward, Sam put his hand on Dean’s chest—it felt like Dean’s heartbeat was his own—and pushed, hard enough that Dean took a blessed, awful step back.

“First, we have to make sure Famine’s been taken care of.”

Dean pouted, but he wasn’t so far gone that he ignored Sam. Or maybe, Sam thought and quashed the idea immediately, what he really wanted was Sam’s _willingness_.

After Sam exorcised all the demons inside Famine, Dean didn’t bring up what had happened, and Sam wasn’t planning to either. Especially since Adam was apparently dead inside (even Castiel’s skewed and slightly distracted report couldn’t skip over that part of their encounter with Famine before Sam arrived), and they still had the other Horsemen to track down. Yes, it would be _nice_ if he had the time to freak out over his apparently shared attraction to his half-brother, but he just wasn’t seeing where it fit on the schedule.

****

Dean didn’t know how to think about the cupid’s revelations. He’d always thought he was a jerk—a con artist and a love-‘em-and-leave-‘em type—because of his dad. His dad who abandoned him and his mom, when his mom was way too young to be alone with a kid to support. He’d grown up thinking John Winchester was just an asshole sperm donor. Finding out that John might not have had much choice when he walked out the door was going to require a radical rethinking of his own life. Could people even fight cupids? Was it like being possessed, no choice at all? From what Sam and Adam had said, his father had raised them to think their mom had been some kind of saint, even if he hadn’t been a monk after her death. And was what John had felt different from real love, if that even existed?

These were all perfectly sucky questions, and the information wasn’t exactly important to their present clusterfuck. 

So he shoved his uncertainties aside, only for things to get exponentially weirder when they were ripped out of reality and through a bunch of tired television plots. Dean wasn’t even resentful that he was the sidekick/lab tech/nurse in most of them, though being Sam’s serious-but-supportive partner in the herpes ad was, he thought, really unfair. As was having to read questions in Japanese before Sam got punched in the balls.

When the ratty little Trickster—apparently he was also some sort of angel, but given how he’d just put them through TVLand hell, Dean was fine sticking with ‘Trickster’—showed up in person, he started off by ignoring Dean and lecturing Sam and Adam about their destinies. But after a couple of minutes of boring ranting, he slowed, eyes flicking over to Dean again and again, and then stopped entirely in favor of staring at Dean like he wanted to cut him into bite-sized pieces.

“Well, you are a puzzle,” the Trickster said while Sam demanded to know what was going on. “You shouldn’t be here at all. And I should know—I do this for a living, after all.”

“What do you mean?” Adam shouldered in front of Sam, murder in his eyes. “Is this another one of your sick jokes? Maybe we don’t really have a brother at all.”

Dean sneered a little at that—Adam _wished_ —but Dean himself wasn’t a hundred percent on what he wanted to be the truth of his existence at this point.

“Oh, he’s your brother all right,” the Trickster said. “It’s just _wrong_. And, honestly, I’m not sure I’d tell you the details if I knew them. You clowns are already too focused on your narcissistic personalities. You should be thinking about stepping into your assigned roles and saving the world, not about Daddy’s wild oats.”

“Second verse, same as the first,” Adam snarked. The Trickster snapped his fingers and Adam was wearing a ball gag, which Dean probably shouldn’t have found as funny as he did.

“Clock’s running down, boys,” the Trickster said. “Bow to your partners and get in line, or it’s gonna get a whole lot worse.”

Personally, Dean thought that when all the supernatural folks spent so much time telling Sam and Adam that they were destined to play specific roles, that was pretty good evidence that there was some free will involved. Not that free will would necessarily help while there were so many ways to hurt the Winchesters and use them against each other. But, as far as Dean could tell, people didn’t usually spend a lot of time denouncing stuff that couldn’t happen. And given how badly they’d seen angels and demons behave, Dean was thinking that they were enough like people to justify the same conclusion: resistance was possible.

Of course, Sam and Adam _said_ the same, when they could be made to talk about the situation at all. But some days, like the ones following the Trickster’s illustrated lecture, Dean thought he might be the only one who really believed.

****

Sam wondered what it would have been like to be the little brother instead. Maybe what he felt for Dean was the desire for security: Not to have to be in charge, responsible for the apocalypse and all his other screwups along the way, from Ruby to Jess to leaving Adam with Dad for four more years of indoctrination into how he was never good enough.

Now that Dean knew Sam’s worst secrets, he was easy to talk to. Sam told him about Jess, and it wasn’t fraught the way it had been with Adam, both of them resentful and afraid. Sam told him about Ruby, a rawer wound, but Dean listened and offered a few inappropriate stories about his own sexual misadventures that, while funny enough to make Sam’s stomach ache from laughter, really didn’t compare to fucking a demon and letting Lucifer out of his cage. But that probably wasn’t the point.

They didn’t talk about Dean’s almost-advance under Famine’s influence. Sam knew better than anyone how wires could get crossed in someone’s head when the pressure was too great. Combine mortal danger and total secrecy and of course boundaries were going to blur. 

“I get it, you fucked up,” Dean said, one night when Adam was finally passed out on the bed nearest the door and Dean himself was listing pretty severely, sitting on the floor but propped up by the other bed. “You don’t have to keep telling me. I’m not saying you should forget about it, but there’s a lot more to you than your worst day.”

Sam, who was very carefully positioned so that getting to Dean would require more coordination than he possessed at this particular stage of drunkenness, shrugged. “I want to make amends,” he explained, his lips numb. There was nothing he could do for the nurse he’d killed, and ‘don’t say yes to Lucifer’ seemed like a low bar for redemption. It was a puzzle.

Dean didn’t seem to have any better ideas. He took another pull from his bottle and wiped his mouth. It was distracting, his mouth. The promise of sin, but nothing really _bad_. Naughty boy, Sam thought. 

“If we get the rings,” Sam said, wanting a change of topic from Dean’s pretty, drunk-open face, “I gotta be the one to open the door, you know that, right? I’m the only one who can lure Lucifer close enough.”

Dean was too drunk to raise one eyebrow, so he made do with both. “Much as he wants your fine ass, I think he’s gonna notice a swirling door to Hell right next to you.”

Adam moaned in his sleep, turning over so that he was on his stomach. He used to sleep like that when he was a kid, Sam remembered, but even more exaggeratedly—his butt pointing straight at the ceiling as he curled in on himself. It was the cutest fucking thing imaginable. He felt a pulsing warmth in his chest, a protective love for both of them. He’d gotten Lucifer’s party started, and it was his job to stop it.

“You’re right,” he told Dean. “We’ll figure out a way to hide it.”

Or, maybe, a way to give Lucifer what he thought he wanted, then spring the trap. Whatever it takes, he thought, watching Dean’s slightly open mouth as Dean contemplated the room with soused intensity. Whatever it takes.

****

Not too long after they started meeting Horsemen, Dean got a literal taste of Heaven. It tasted like his mom’s buttered toast and hot cocoa, the kind she made after he’d been playing outside in the snow. Sitting at her kitchen table, watching her putter around, was the best he’d felt in—he couldn’t remember. Even knowing that she was dead—that _they_ were dead, thanks to Adam’s psycho hunter friends—he still felt warm and cocooned, safe in a way that he knew life didn’t really offer.

When Sam showed up, the first thing he thought was, now he can have a mom too. It just seemed so natural that his mom would love Sam in just the same way. Maybe in the real world it would matter that Sam was the son of the woman who’d stolen her man away (not on purpose, but nobody would expect her to be particularly understanding about cupidity), but here Dean thought that Mom’s only concern would be how good Dean felt when he was with Sam.

But Sam had a different agenda—they needed to get through Heaven and find Adam. This turned out to be more difficult than just moving through happy memories (and they skedaddled fast out of the night Dean lost his virginity, since at his age perving on sixteen-year-olds in their underwear was pedo territory). 

“Why are these all _my_ memories?” Dean asked, and then realized that it was an awkward question. Happiness and Sam hadn’t often gone together, it seemed. When Sam’s dead friend who’d hacked Heaven showed up, that was a relief. Except that he said something about soulmates that implied … well, Dean wasn’t really prepared to consider what it implied about Sam’s ability to show up in Dean’s Heaven without Ash’s special dimension-hopping skills. Then there was the pure creepy of a million Heavens each with only one real person inside, endlessly masturbating with ghosts of the rest of the world.

Ash got them to Adam’s Heaven, and it was full of graveyards. Apparently Adam had been happiest laying ghosts. Nice, simple work, with standard dangers and respectable payoffs. Dean got why Adam would’ve liked that, though the thought that these were his _top_ memories was pretty depressing.

Fighting their way through to Joshua’s garden while Zachariah searched for them was plenty distracting, but his thoughts kept circling the idea Ash had put into his head.

Yes, God was cruel, a petty prankster who must’ve gotten tired with pulling the wings off of flies and graduated to putting pins in humans just to see them squirm. But soulmates? Doomed to each other the way Dad had been yanked out of his life to be with Mary Winchester? It made his balls want to crawl up into his belly and spat on every good feeling he’d ever had about Sam.

He wasn’t going to let himself be led around by someone else’s plan. 

Except that Sam had thought the same thing, and all it had gotten him was more disappointment when he did exactly what they’d tricked him into doing.

Finally, he understood why two guys who knew exactly what lurked in the dark were so good at denial when it came to everything else. Fighting for their lives against angels and devils was easier than fixing what was wrong in their heads.

And when God’s gardener rejected their pleas for help, Dean couldn’t pretend to be surprised. Deep inside, where Dean had spent a lifetime feeling hollow, the space that he thought hunting with his brothers might fill was changing. Filling with a thick red rage. Angels, demons, God: they were all shit. Free will, they said, and then blamed humanity for the hand it had been dealt—told Sam he was an abomination, when that was a better description of them. Somebody needed to deal out some justice to all the supernatural assholes who thought they were above judgment. 

****

After they were brought back to life (a first for Dean, but Sam and Adam were jaded enough that they were both surprised at how freaked out Dean was at having to ditch his shirt because of the holes from the shotgun blast), Castiel deigned to give them an update on the broader strategic situation.

“Lucifer is destroying his flawed vessel,” he said with his customary deadpan. “He can continue to switch to inferior vessels with collateral bloodlines, but it is painful, and he will feel that it is beneath his dignity.”

“Sure,” Adam said. “It’s so annoying to be stuck in the _wrong_ mud monkey.” Sam didn’t blame him for remaining resentful. It was one thing to condescend, and another to be a filthy traitor. Among the many regrets Sam had from that time, Uriel’s death wasn’t on the list. 

“We must expect that Michael will attempt to find and exploit you,” Castiel continued, his eyes never leaving Adam’s face. “If Michael takes his true vessel, he will be powerful enough to defeat Lucifer. And to trigger the End Times. That is why you and Sam are significant: your souls can enhance the power of the possessing angel. It is the difference between an internal combustion engine and nuclear fusion.”

Sam had kind of guessed that the angels weren’t playing for Team Human, but to hear it like that still made his stomach lurch. “You’re sure, that’s the plan?”

Castiel deigned to frown at him. “Even in an ordinary vessel, Michael should prevail in single combat. The additional benefit of a host with the true bloodline is the ability to reset the arc of existence. Have you not noticed that Sam has carefully been preserved alongside Adam? Either one would suffice for their plan.” Castiel, Sam noticed, was calling his fellow angels ‘they’ now. Maybe, Sam thought, he could forgive the way Castiel kept leaning in too close to his baby brother.

Okay, that explained why Michael hadn’t showered down on some poor believer the way Castiel had. Just beating the tar out of Lucifer wouldn’t get his plan anywhere. He needed Adam.

Who was looking dangerously close to puking. “Cas,” he said. “I don’t know if—what if I don’t hold out?”

They were all thinking of him stepping off the rack in Hell, picking up his razor like a good little torturer. Sam wanted to scream—that too must have been part of the angels’ plan. Breaking Adam, then gluing him back together but with an intimate knowledge of where the fractures were, so they could be smashed again when needed.

“You will,” Castiel insisted, his voice as rough as broken concrete. 

“We will,” Sam said, forcing his tone to hold the confidence he didn’t feel. “We’ll put Lucifer back in the Cage, and then Michael can go pound sand.”

****

As it happened, Sam’s genius plan for stuffing Lucifer back into place involved wrapping him in Sam. On the basis of not much evidence, as far as Dean could see, they thought that Sam could fight him off just long enough to jump into the Pit. 

Since the alternative seemed to be that they’d be hounded and tortured until one of them broke, Dean understood the principle. He just didn’t like the odds. Or the price tag.

That furnace of anger inside him was churning all the time now. He wanted one of those angel-killing knives, to make a matched set with the one for demons. He wanted to be able to do that thing Castiel did where he white-lighted a roomful of demons into screaming corpses, only with angels instead. (He’d make an exception for Castiel, because the dude did seem remorseful, and Adam was into him, which might be Stockholm Syndrome but they weren’t in a position to turn down good vibes of any kind.) 

He wanted a lot of things he’d never imagined before he’d found out about ghouls, and brothers, and the Winchester family business. He knew why Sam had drunk demon blood now. Anything, any advantage, that might work against these assholes was worth trying.

On the last night before Sam said yes, they had a nearly silent dinner together, and then Adam said he needed some time to clear his head. Castiel and Sam traded significant glances, and when Castiel nodded it was pretty clear he’d heard Sam’s unspoken order to make sure Adam didn’t do anything dumber than usual. Adam could lean on Castiel, and that was going to be important in the days to come if this plan worked. Dean would do what he could, too, but he knew that being Adam’s brother might be more painful than helpful, at least for a while.

That left Sam and Dean and an empty motel room. The air seemed heavier inside, more than the funk of three guys (and one angel) under great stress. There was an old-fashioned clock on the wall, ticking loud as breaking branches until Dean ripped it off of the wall.

“Dean,” Sam said, like he could _apologize_ for what he was going to do, the way he’d been apologizing for months. But this was a different dumb idea than the past ones, driven by thin hopes and not by the narrowed-vision haze of revenge. 

The one thing Dean could do was make sure Sam understood that. He dumped the clock and its trailing wires into the trash and turned to Sam. Sam was sitting on the edge of the bed, eyes wide beneath his shaggy hair. He needs a haircut, Dean thought, and nearly doubled over with the realization that he was never going to get one.

Sam licked his lips. “Listen,” he said, his hands clutching at each other like that was the only comfort he could get.

Dean interrupted before he could put himself down again. “You know you’re a hero, right? It’s not your fault you got fooled.”

“By a _demon_ ,” Sam said.

Dean walked right up to him and crossed his arms over his chest, staring down at him like a cop who’d just pulled over a guy going fifty in a twenty-five zone. “Did you think you were going to set Lucifer free?”

This was not a rhetorical question, and he waited for Sam’s answer, which came reluctantly: “No.”

“Then you deserve a walk of shame, dude, but this whole thing? It’s not on you.”

“I killed someone. A person. And don’t say so have you—” Dean shut his mouth—“because it’s different in a hunt. I killed someone to help myself get revenge against Lilith, and yeah Ruby lied to get me to do it, but I did it. It doesn’t matter that I didn’t know it would start the apocalypse. I can’t bring her back, but if I can protect the rest of the world, then that’s what I have to do.”

Dean would’ve said that even murderers didn’t generally have to lock themselves to Lucifer in Hell, but he didn’t think that would help. “You’re still a hero.”

Sam looked like he was going to keep arguing (in other words, he looked like Sam), so Dean did the only thing he could think of to shut him up. He leaned forward, put his hands on Sam’s cheeks, and kissed him.

It wasn’t a chaste kiss.

Sam’s hands—God, they were _huge_ —grabbed his hips, pulling him into Sam’s lap as Dean opened his mouth and tasted Sam for the first, the only, time. Like this, Dean had to tip his head down to kiss Sam, Sam’s hands roving over his back, tugging his shirt free from his jeans.

Sam leaned his head back far enough to speak. “Wait,” he said, even though his fingers were still digging into Dean’s waist.

“I don’t care,” Dean said, each word separate as a gunshot. “We’re not hurting anyone, and it’s not fair, and I—” The last time he’d said he loved someone, it was to his mom. Even as a horny teenager, he’d never been able to give that lie to a girl. But it was true: Sam was strong, and beautiful, and so brave he made Dean’s heart ache. Sam’s mistakes hadn’t made him curl up and die, the way Dean would’ve done. Sam kept fighting, and he made Dean want to be strong enough to do the same.

He kissed Sam before Sam had to figure out how to respond. Sam didn’t fight very hard to stop him this time, and soon they were pulling off each other’s shirts like they were filming an amateur porno, all wet sounds and grabby hands. “God, you’re hot,” Dean said, without meaning to, staring at Sam’s incredible chest and abs. Who wouldn’t want to rule and/or destroy the world looking like that?

Sam mumbled something and tugged Dean into an embrace that brought their chests together so that he could stick his hands down the back of Dean’s jeans, grabbing Dean’s ass in his hands, so big that Dean could feel him _everywhere_. Dean groaned and tilted his head back, and Sam’s mouth fastened on his neck like Sam was thinking about going vampire. Dean got his knees up on the bed just enough that he could grind their hips together in the dirtiest lap dance possible with both of them still in their jeans.

“C’mon,” Sam said, and Dean realized he’d been saying it for a while. They disentangled just long enough to kick off the rest of their clothes, and then Dean pushed Sam back into the bed. Knowing that Sam only went because he wanted to, that he could’ve wrestled Dean into submission at any moment, just made it all hotter.

They humped like kids for a while, kissing and mapping each other with their hands. Dean was frantic with the knowledge that there was no time. He’d never be able to do everything he wanted, and he couldn’t choose. Sam’s dick slipped against his belly, hot and thick, and he wrestled a hand between them so he could get a grip on it, running his thumb from the base up to the flare of the head. Sam made a noise closer to a growl than anything else.

It was so good. Wanted back by Sam, who _knew_ him, who’d seen him drunk and bloody and crying for his mom, who was going to save the world. He needed to see Sam come.

He rolled them, pulling Sam on top, spat on his hand, and started jerking Sam in earnest, his other hand pushing Sam’s shoulder up so that he could see. His own cock rubbed against Sam’s and against his own fingers, his hips pulsing uncontrolled.

Sam’s tattoo flexed with every breath. He was watching Dean watching him, the two of them panting in time, the slick red head of Sam’s cock winking in and out of Dean’s grip. When Sam came, streaking hot over Dean’s chest, Dean held on and felt every pulse, almost like it was his own.

Sam collapsed to the side, repeating Dean’s name like it was the only word he knew. He rubbed his hand over Dean’s stomach, collecting his own come, and curled his fingers around Dean’s aching dick, but he was clumsy with aftershocks. They both moaned when Dean closed his hand around Sam’s, smaller but still strong, and helped him get Dean the rest of the way there, making Dean even more of a mess. 

He wanted so much more of Sam. He didn’t care why, or whose awful plan it had been to link the two of them together. He just wanted to freeze time, sticky and warm together in this dark room. 

He roused a bit when Sam got up. “Shh,” Sam told him. “I just—I’ve gotta talk to Adam.”

Dean nodded and let himself drift.

****

Sam cleaned up before he went outside to call Adam, leaving Dean asleep on the bed. That was going to be hard to explain, and he was almost glad he wasn’t going to need to be the one to do it. But he didn’t need to call, because Adam was right there, sitting on the hood of the Impala, a six-pack next to him but only two beers gone.

“Where’s Castiel?”

Adam looked up at the stars and shrugged. “We had a couple, and then he said that it was almost time for our conversation and blinked out.”

Sam briefly wondered just how much Castiel knew about what had happened between him and Dean, then pushed the thought aside. “Conversation, hunh? I guess he doesn’t know you that well after all.” He hoisted himself up so that they were side by side.

“He was telling me that I have to let you do this, not because you’re my big brother but because you’re the only one who can.”

“Adam, I want you to know—” Sam said, meaning: I’m sorry I wasn’t a better big brother. I’m sorry I couldn’t stick around. I’m sorry I ever made you feel like it was you I didn’t respect and not hunting. I’m sorry I couldn’t save you from Hell. 

“Shut up,” Adam suggested. He knocked his shoulder against Sam’s, and they stared up at the night sky. When he was a kid, Sam knew all the constellations; now, they looked more like runes to him—Norse, Enochian, a couple of other traditions, scattered across the firmament: a testament to how his imagination had narrowed over the last few years as the supernatural ate away at everything else he cared about. But that didn’t matter any more. What mattered was right next to him, and in the motel room nearby.

“You have to promise me not to try to get me out. Keep going, keep fighting, whatever makes you happy, but no more deals. The price is too high.”

Adam looked down at his empty bottle. “Happy,” he said.

Sam winced. “Promise me you’ll make a life. That you won’t hate yourself when it gets better. Let Dean look out for you. It’s what I want.”

Adam’s lip twitched. A long time ago, when he’d told Sam not to worry about him being in Hell, Sam had pointed out that Adam didn’t get to have an opinion on the subject since he wasn’t going to be around. Turnabout was probably fair play, not that the Winchesters would recognize fair play if it hit them in the ‘nads. But Adam didn’t say that, just picked at a fraying patch on the knee of his jeans.

“When I was a kid,” Adam said finally, “I didn’t understand how you could love someone enough to let them go. It took me a long time to get there, and I hated the whole time.”

“Does that mean you’re actually going to listen to me for once in your life and promise me to leave it alone?”

“You gotta admit,” Adam said and tipped back until he was lying flat against the hood of the car, staring up at the clouds rushing past the moon, “last time pays for all.” He sighed. “Yeah, I promise.”

Sam felt a hundred pounds lighter. Caging Lucifer was Sam’s duty. Looking after Adam was his job. With Dean and Castiel there for him, Adam would be okay. 

“By the way,” Adam said from his sprawl, “I guess that ‘last night on earth’ thing actually works on the ladies, hunh?” At Sam’s confused-edging-on-horrified look, he clarified, “You smell like shower, dude, which you always do after you get laid. Myself, I like to enjoy the scent of a woman, really let it sink into my skin.”

“That’s because you’re indescribably gross,” Sam said, voice thick with tears.

“Don’t hate the player,” Adam said, not exactly steady himself.

They stared up at the stars and waited for the morning together.

****

Dean woke in a room that reminded him of something out of _Dangerous Liaisons_ , all gold-and-white striped wallpaper and couches too slippery to sit on, which he proved by promptly sliding to the floor and then flailing to his feet.

“Fuck!” he said. He was only in his T-shirt and boxers—at least he wasn’t _naked_ —and he could still feel Sam’s marks all over him. “Sam?” he called out. “Castiel?”

Instead, his dad materialized—his dad from way back, the one he had in a picture. He knew this part of the story. “You must be Michael,” he said. “Pleased to meet you, now fuck off.”

“I brought you here to offer you a chance to save your world,” the angel said, more calmly than Dad had ever spoken.

“Thanks, but I think we’ve got that covered,” Dean bluffed. Castiel was okay, for an angel, but that was pretty much his limit on tolerating human-body-stealing creatures with powers ripped from eternity.

“Yes, your plan to hold Lucifer in Sam’s body as you reopen the gate to his prison,” Michael said, which was an unpleasant shock. Michael must have figured it out because they’d kind of visibly chewed their way through the Horsemen. “Sam isn’t strong enough to fight off my brother. Do you really think an addict, however briefly reformed, can hold back the Prince of Light? You’ve never even seen a human being throw off an ordinary angel.”

Dean started. They’d thought about Lucifer as a demon. Demons could, sometimes, be fought by someone who knew what they were doing—they’d seen Bobby do it. But if it wasn’t the same with fallen angels, then they were completely fucked. And Lucifer had sure seemed to hold ordinary demons in contempt when they’d confronted him with the Colt. 

Michael leaned forward, his expression the same as Dad’s when he knew that Dean had been concealing some misadventure carried out between Dad’s visits. “I know you care for him, and he’s no worse than any other human in his weakness. But can you bet the world on this untested strategy?”

Dean didn’t want to talk about this, especially not with someone with his father’s face. “Can’t you … wear somebody else for this conversation?” 

Michael’s eyes were indifferent. “Why?” 

“I guess you wouldn’t understand,” Dean muttered. Michael’s Father, after all, didn’t seem to have disappointed him—or maybe Michael just hadn’t admitted it yet.

“You will be my host,” Michael announced. “Your blood is strong enough to bear my grace for the limited time necessary to discipline my brother.”

“ _What_?” Dean felt dumb, but that was a curveball.

“He cannot be allowed to prevail before the Final Battle,” Michael said, clearly agreeing with Dean’s assessment of his own intelligence. “I need a vessel, however inferior, in the human world until Lucifer is contained. Your lineage suffices.”

“I’m gonna go with no on that,” Dean said.

“Or I could torture your consent out of you,” Michael said, and Dean was consumed with pain, his lungs collapsing as his bones seemed to go to liquid lead inside him. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t scream; his eyes filled with red and he could feel his hair, his fingernails, his skin starting to loosen and slough off as the blood poured out of him.

When Dean’s vision cleared, he was on his (intact) hands and knees. The marble floor was clean and cold.

He spat—there was no blood in it—and looked up at the angel. Well, that fully sucked. “Answer’s still no.”

Honestly, he didn’t know how long he could hold out against that kind of pain. But he was betting that Michael didn’t know either.

The angel looked peeved. “You do know that I can control time. We can have years of this in the moment it takes your brothers to notice that you have disappeared.”

“Wait,” Dean said. “You mean—it’s still night, in the world.”

Michael tilted his head: the ant was, inexplicably, arguing over the precise position of his blade of grass. “Yes.”

Dean’s head was still buzzing with the echoes of the pain, worse than he’d imagined possible. But if no time had passed, then Sam hadn’t said yes yet. If Michael could take Lucifer out now, in his deficient vessel, then Sam wouldn’t _need_ to. 

The angels must think that Lucifer was getting some sort of advantage on the ground—that he was going to be in position to win the apocalypse. Somehow, Michael needed a temporary vessel long enough fight Lucifer to a draw, and to convince his permanent one to say yes. Dean was going to be a stepping stone to Adam. And Michael could end the world as easily as Lucifer could in a true vessel.

Unless the angels wanted _not to lose_ more than they wanted to destroy humanity. From what he’d seen of angels, Dean thought that just might be the case.

“Your brother,” Dean said, slowly.

“Lucifer,” Michael clarified, as if he wasn’t sure they were on the same page.

“How badly do you want to beat him?”

Michael lifted his chin. For the first time, his expression changed. “He lost his place by our Father’s side, but his arrogance remains untouched.”

“I’ll take that as ‘very badly,’” Dean said, and hoped that the way he was shaking with fear wasn’t that noticeable to an angel. “You’d rather stop him now than have him win, even if that means losing your true vessel.”

Michael frowned. “I will have my true vessel.” Like he was saying one plus one equals two. 

Well, Dean thought, we’re not doing math today. “But if you had to choose: apocalypse or kicking Lucifer’s rebellious ass.”

Castiel, Dean realized, was kind of an amateur at the ‘puny human, your concerns are meaningless and incomprehensible to me’ look. But Dean had learned to wait it out, and sure enough, Michael liked to hear himself talk. “My brothers and sisters are not united, but _I_ decide. I will see Lucifer humbled.”

“I might be able to get on board with that,” Dean told him.

“You must know, if you say yes, the experience will destroy you, utterly, just as I will destroy Lucifer.”

Now, he had scruples? Well, maybe he hadn’t been involved in the day-to-day manipulations that had screwed over the Winchesters so very thoroughly. “Let me tell you something, pal,” Dean said. “I’ve seen Heaven, and you can keep it.”

As long as Adam didn’t say yes, Michael wouldn’t be able to start the apocalypse, just clean up Lucifer’s mess. The world would be safe, and all it would cost was Dean—a fuckup whose life had improved by becoming fugitive and illegal. Adam and Sam had been heroes all their lives, whereas Dean had been a waste of space. If Dean fixed this, Sam could live to fight more monsters. He could even find a girl and settle down, the way Adam always passive-aggressively reminded him that he wanted.

Between the two of them, there wasn’t really much of a choice.

“I want to make a deal,” he said, each word feeling like a fifty-pound weight.

“I am no crossroads demon,” the angel said, and there were eerie harmonics in its voice.

“And I’m not some believer you can just order around,” Dean snapped back. “Sam, Adam, and Castiel: they stay safe, which means no Adam sockpuppet for you. You give me your word or I guarantee I can hold out long enough for you to get bored with me screaming. Come on, what’s it matter to you, anyway? Just two people and a minor angel. That’s pocket change for an archangel.”

Abruptly, Michael was only a few inches away. Dean realized: he was exactly his father’s height. He’d never gotten a chance to find that out, before. “I swear to it. Do you consent?”

Dean closed his eyes and drew in a breath. He’d had a good run, really. Weird, but good. “Yes,” he said.

The world dissolved into white.

****

Sam stared down at the trunk full of gallons. In the low light, the blood looked as black as a demon’s eyes, even though he knew it was the same red as any other human’s. Mostly he wanted to be sick, but there was still a little part of him that wanted the rush. Probably there always would be—though in this case, ‘always’ had a pretty short expiration date.

He’d asked for privacy, even though he knew Adam and Castiel weren’t more than fifteen feet away. Regardless, he needed to pretend that he was doing this on his own.

He picked up the first jug.

“Sam?”

He spun at the sound of Lucifer’s delighted voice. A circle of demons surrounded him, and Sam heard the soft pop of air indicating that Castiel had done the smart thing, grabbed Adam and got the fuck out of Dodge. This wasn’t anywhere Sam hadn’t already been heading. 

“You win, okay?” Sam said. He uncapped the jug and brought it up to his mouth to prove his point. The smell of it, meaty and sharp, made his mouth water, and he nearly gagged.

“Halt!”

They all turned, and the demons vanished in explosive puffs as Dean snapped his fingers.

No, not Dean. Something in Dean’s body, holding it in a kind of stillness that Dean could never achieve. “What did you do?” Sam whispered, the jug slipping from his nerveless hands to splash on the concrete.

“Will you not repent, Lucifer?” Dean—Michael, it had to be Michael—asked. “This is not yet written.” But he said it wearily, a cop reading Miranda rights, no expectation of any change in the result.

“You know I won’t,” Lucifer said. “Heard from Dad lately, by the way? A millennium’s a long time to wait between newsletters.”

Michael raised one of Dean’s eyebrows. “My faith is complete. I need no additional instructions.”

“So you grabbed this random idiot, and you’re tearing him to pieces as we speak. Tell me, how does that make you any better than me?”

“I have the mandate of Heaven,” Michael said with calm certainty. “Now is the time to cleanse the earth of every worthless, rebellious thing, to end this ridiculous experiment with free will.”

Castiel and Adam popped into place beside Sam, Castiel’s hand on Adam’s shoulder. The idiot angel must have given in to Adam’s demands to return, even though there was nothing they could do—a fact proved when Michael gestured and Castiel exploded, showering them all with blood and guts.

Sam tried to think. He was weaponless; if he opened the portal now, there was no way he could force Lucifer in on his own. And Michael didn’t seem inclined just to shove the Devil back into the Cage and let bygones be bygones.

Lucifer scoffed. “You came too soon, _brother_. Do you really want to settle this with such inferior hosts?”

Michael’s eyes flashed—literally, they flashed, a bluish glow like lightning. “That’s where we all erred, it seems.” 

Lucifer hesitated, and Michael smiled, Dean’s drop-your-panties grin appropriated by this genocidal being. It made Sam’s skin crawl. “He is my true vessel. The Lord truly works in mysterious ways.” His crow’s feet started to disappear into the glow of his possessed eyes.

Sam’s mind shuddered. Dean had been played somehow, just like him and Ruby. “But—that means—” 

“Yeah,” Adam said. “Apocalypse nowish.”

Michael hit him and he bounced off of the car and was silent. 

Sam lunged and was also thrown back, staying upright only because he’d crashed into the Impala. “You,” Michael said. “You kept throwing your brother off track. You and your weakness, your pride.” He hit Sam again, shattering his cheekbone. The pain was like a starburst inside him.

He raised his fist, Dean’s fist, and Sam could tell that it was going to go straight through his skull and into the metal of the car.

Dean, it’s okay, Sam tried to say. It’s okay. 

He waited, his breath wet and painful—he’d broken at least two ribs, and he thought there was some internal bleeding—and he wished he’d told Dean that he loved him, just once. He hoped Dean knew anyway.

Slowly, Dean’s fist uncurled, his hand hanging in the air. He started to pant, vibrating like he was getting ready to run a race. 

He’d done what Sam was supposed to, Sam realized: he’d grabbed the wheel back, at least for a moment. Michael had the power to destroy the earth, but not just yet.

“The plan,” Dean said. “Gotta stick with the plan, Sam.”

Sam opened his mouth to insist that this was in no way the plan, and Dean shook his head, then grimaced. 

“Not much time,” Dean gritted out. “Don’t make this all for nothin’.”

Dean was a true vessel with an angel about to claw its way out. There was only one place they knew that could protect the world from that. Sam, feeling like he was made of stone, reached in his pocket and threw the interlocked rings on the ground. Dean grunted as the hole swirled open.

Out of nowhere, something hit him from the side, and he went over.

Lucifer, in his stolen, inferior host. Too angry at his wayward brother to leave, even when the danger was gaping open right next to him. Sam could see that the sores had spread. He looked like a zombie out of a late-night B movie. Dean roared, and for a second the light spilling out of his eyes was back, Michael fighting to the surface. Then Dean was standing again, his arm around Lucifer’s throat, snorting with effort. Lucifer, oblivious to Dean’s strain, struggled wildly.

There was no way he could hold them both for long. Dean’s eyes were soft, understanding. “Sorry,” he said, almost too low to hear. “Be happy, Sammy.” Holding tightly to Lucifer, he let himself fall backwards into the Pit.

 

 

Epilogue

Sam was still frozen in place, staring at the empty space where they’d vanished, when Castiel reappeared to heal his and Adam’s injuries. 

Dean was in Hell. He’d sent another brother to Hell. This time, he’d done it on purpose. He’d gone along, even knowing what it would mean for Dean.

He gagged, but there was nothing inside him. He’d fasted, because he’d thought he was going to have to drink gallons of blood.

“If he was the true vessel, then Michael could have destroyed this world even without Lucifer,” Castiel told them. “This was his sacrifice.”

Sam couldn’t even look over at Adam, knowing how Adam must be remembering his own suffering. 

Sam wanted to say yes to Lucifer, now; he wanted to have the power to tear the world apart. If this was all there was—this unfairness, God’s thirst for blood, this absence of mercy—then it _should_ be destroyed.

Adam’s arms around him were a shock. He remembered Adam—smaller, less muscled, less beaten down—doing the same thing when he’d rescued Sam from watching Jess burn alive. Adam was always pulling him away from his losses. Sam fought for a few seconds, then collapsed, hiding his face against his little brother’s chest.

After a few days, Adam found them a hunt, and they went. What else were they supposed to do? Castiel was off doing something warlike in Heaven. Sam could happily have watched the heavenly sphere burn, and barely excluded Castiel from that, but anyway the angel was out of the picture after one last intense conversation with Adam.

Sam had a brother, saved from the Pit. (Sam would never let himself think he had the wrong one: it was _all_ wrong, and he wasn’t going to play the game of guilt and shame when something else was pulling the strings.) Dean had been tricked into making the wrong move, just like Sam. _Sam_ was supposed to have been the one to pay for his mistake, just like Sam was supposed to have died in the first place. 

He should’ve been even angrier now, but the emptiness was too great even for that. He felt like a burnt-out shell, an outline only recognizable by the spaces where he used to be. Adam did his best, but he could tell that something had cracked inside Sam. Slowly, they cut back on the hunting, spending more time hustling or even traveling. They followed a couple of bands halfway around the country, the way Sam had always wanted to when they were younger but had never been able to convince Adam to do, since there were always hunts to be found instead.

Adam started talking about finding Sam a place where he could go back to school. Adam wouldn’t leave him, not when Sam was like this, but Adam was a hunter and eventually he was going to get tired of coddling Sam. He’d wait for Sam to get over Dean, the same way he’d waited for Sam to mourn Jess, and he’d plan to leave Sam secure and healing, back on track for a normal life. Sam didn’t have the heart to admit that he was broken for good, this time around.

****

Sam and Adam had stuck together, which made them easier to track down when Dean decided it was time to reconnect. Then it was just a matter of researching potential hunts and cross-checking fake credit cards. Really, it was surprising the Winchesters hadn’t been caught more often by the cops, though Dean guessed that it was easy to form the wrong impression when you didn’t believe in the monsters.

There was a lot of boring and pointless yelling, mainly from Sam, which was weird given that Adam was the one who didn’t like him nearly as much. Then the tests, which Dean had expected, though Sam came up with a couple Dean hadn’t known about despite all the time he’d spent studying with Samuel and his crew. That taken care of, Dean figured, they could get back to business.

“Glad you’re still in the game,” he said, and picked up a rifle that was lying on one of the beds, a sure sign that Adam had just reassembled it. 

“What happened?” Sam asked.

“I don’t know,” Dean said, shrugging. “I just woke up topside. Maybe God finally spotted us one. And I’m not lying like Adam was—I really don’t remember.” Samuel Campbell and his merry band of hunters were a complication that he wasn’t yet sure the Winchesters needed to know about. They got kind of irrational around matters related to poor dead Mary, and here ‘related’ was the important word.

“Wait, you don’t remember _anything_?” Adam demanded, like having _him_ ask instead would get a different answer. Jealous, probably. Dean didn’t blame him, but his incredulity was still annoying.

“Nope,” he said. “Anyhow, you’re here because of the werewolf attacks, right? So what’s the plan?”

****

Dean was back, but he wasn’t _Dean_ , which was obvious from the moment he convinced one of the hikers to stake herself out as bait. Sam missed that conversation, but he didn’t miss Dean aiming to take out the biggest wolf first, even though the smaller one was closest to the hiker.

If Adam hadn’t been such a crack shot, she’d have been dinner, and then next month they’d have had to put her down too. If Dean didn’t do it preemptively before then, which from his icy green glare Sam thought might have crossed his mind when he checked her over for injuries, pausing only to leer down her shirt.

Sam thought he might be in shock. 

_Dean_ wasn’t in shock. He moved through the forest like he’d been a hunter all his life. Like the only thing he cared about was killing monsters, with saving people a tolerable side effect. 

It was PTSD, maybe. Sam had done enough reading when Adam came back to know that there were lots of ways of reacting to trauma (case in point: Sam’s own addiction; he wasn’t going to pretend to be emotionally intact himself). Even if Dean was telling the truth about his memories, there were all kinds of ways a person could protect himself from trauma, and Dean’s reflexes might be telling more of the truth of what happened than his mouth was.

Dean might not even have his memories of what had happened just before he went into the Pit. Sam didn’t know how to ask: hey, so, that one time we had goodbye incest, do you remember that as fondly as I do? Did they use that to torture you with?

Sam was still trying to formulate askable questions when they got back to the room, filthy and reeking. Dean hadn’t made a crack about the condition of the Impala, even.

“I need to get laid,” Dean said as he wiped the last of the werewolf’s blood off of his face. “I was getting it regular from this one hunter chick, but she didn’t take it too well when she found out I was also banging the witnesses. I always wondered what it would be like, to have a girl you kept going back to. Turns out there’s a lot of yelling. Bars are a lot simpler. So, you in?” 

At Adam’s horrified gape, Dean smirked. “Worth asking.”

Sam didn’t bother to try to keep him from leaving. He’d sought them out, and whatever was going on with him, that meant he’d be back.

“What. The. Fuck,” Adam said, as soon as Dean’s footsteps were no longer audible.

“Can you call Castiel?”

Adam raised his eyebrows, an echo of his maddening teenage condescension. “I’ve sent two prayers and three texts already. Bobby?”

“Speaking as the guy who got locked up in his panic room at least one time too many, I’m gonna go with no on that. Not yet.” He hesitated. “You’re our expert on getting out of Hell.”

Adam sighed and scratched the back of his neck. “I don’t know jack about the Cage. If they even have a rack in there, it’s probably just for shits and giggles.” Adam had a point. Human souls were tortured to turn them into demons, but inside Lucifer’s Cage there was no reason to think it worked the same way. And whatever was going on with Dean, he wasn’t black-eyed.

“Hey,” Adam said, like Sam was the one who needed careful treatment when the subject of Hell came up. “We’ll figure it out, okay? Like we always do. Eventually,” he amended with tactless honesty.

Sam remembered what it was like to know his brother was always up for a fight. Losing that certainty before had convinced him to go along with Ruby and her supposed plan to save the world. Getting that confidence back was like going from a dark tunnel into a warm spring morning. Yes, something crazy was up with Dean, but they’d figure it out together because between the two of them there was nothing they couldn’t stomp into submission. 

“I can see you planning to hug me from here,” Adam said warningly.

“Guess you’re ready for it, then,” Sam said, and Adam didn’t in fact wriggle all that hard. At the end he did try to give Sam a wedgie, but that was just for show. 

****

Dean had assumed that he’d get to fuck Sam again, and he’d been looking forward to it, enough to put up with Sam’s picky eating habits and Adam’s commitment to soaking every towel he could find and leaving them all on the bathroom floor like he was hoping to create a new and clammy carpeting trend. The memory was pretty spectacular, even if Dean couldn’t quite understand why they’d been so intense about it.

Unfortunately, Adam turned out to be an exquisite cock-block. Dean could’ve sworn he knew that Dean had designs on his brother, his full brother that was, and he managed to be in Dean’s face every time Dean thought about proposing even the quickest of quickies. And Dean knew that Sam wouldn’t go for it unless he thought that Adam didn’t know—or at least unless he could pretend to himself that Adam didn’t know. The man had been addicted to the blood of the demon he was screwing. He knew how to lie to himself when it got him what he wanted.

And he wanted Dean. Dean was as sure of it as he ever was. Lots of people looked at him like they wanted to fuck him. Most of them _did_ want, and a fair number of them would act on that want when given the opportunity, because Dean was prime rib in a world of McDonald’s. Dean had made a couple of mistakes about the difference between want and would when he’d first gotten back topside. He figured it was because he was asking more often now; a drifter didn’t have to worry as much about getting punched by the coworker whose wife he’d screwed last Saturday night. But he always recognized the want, which among other things usually made getting what _he_ wanted easier, whether that was information, money, or just the average screw. 

Anyhow, Sam was on the long list of Dean’s admirers, which Dean confirmed by doing his workouts where Sam could see and taking his time about getting dressed after his showers. This had the disadvantage of Adam regularly throwing sopping-wet towels at his head, even though his big head wasn’t what Adam wanted him to cover up. But if he wasn’t going to get to fuck Sam at least Dean could enjoy making him squirm. Pretty soon, Dean was sure, Sam was going to break and go at him even if Adam was on the other side of a very thin wall.

****

Eventually, Castiel diagnosed Dean soulless, which meant that Dean’s soul was still suffering down in Hell. It was just like it had been with Adam, only horrible in a different way because of the Dean-shaped shell following them around, leering at Sam and ignoring Adam’s increasingly freaked-out reactions. The only thing that mattered was getting Dean’s soul out. 

So at the four-month mark, which had obvious emotional significance, Adam did his usual stupid ill-thought-out move and contacted Death by virtue of deliberately flatlining, which was a clusterfuck all around. Except that he _brought Dean back_ , right there in Bobby’s living room. Screaming and flailing and cringing, yes, but Sam had expected trauma. “There’s enough of him left to fit in a doggie bag,” Death said. “That’s impressive. Try a little gratitude.”

Adam’s hand on his chest stopped Sam from explaining just how _grateful_ he was. 

They sedated Dean with enough drugs to knock out a blue whale, and Sam settled in to keep watch over him. What with Dean tied to the bed for his own safety, there were going to be messes to clean up, and Sam wasn’t going to ask Adam to do that. Thinking through the basic physical details helped calm him. These were real things that he could do, and they would help Dean, or at least not make him worse.

Adam knocked on the door and came in without waiting. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Sam said back, meaning, I’m not breaking down or relapsing, so that’s one worry you can cross off your list for now. Adam nodded his comprehension. Some days, it was good to have a brotherly code that was so well-distilled.

“Look,” Adam said, scuffing his toe on the ground, “I think I need to get back out there. I’m gonna try to figure out what crawled up Cas’s ass.” He stared at Dean’s still face. “You … just help Dean.”

“Don’t go without me,” Sam said. He wasn’t going to let Adam down again, no matter how much it tore him up. Dean would—Dean would get better, and he’d understand.

“Man, you’ve got—look, I know you and Dean—whatever, don’t make me say it. But I gotta know what’s up with Cas, and I’m guessing we don’t have all the time in the world. I’ll be as careful as I can.”

“You’d better be,” Sam said at last. “I can still whip your ass if I need to. And, thanks, Adam.”

“Whatever,” Adam said, in the way that meant ‘right back at you.’

Maybe Dean would never be all the way better. Maybe Heaven and Hell still had some unexploded grenades lying around. But on the third day, after Dean had woken for the first time without screaming, when Sam crawled into bed with Dean and wrapped his arms around him, Dean stopped shaking. 

Two days later, after Sam had helped him to the bathroom and back, while Sam was easing him back down, he rasped, almost inaudibly, “Sam?”

“I’m here,” Sam said, and if he cried a little he was entitled. Dean didn’t say more, just curled up and let Sam mold himself around Dean’s back, both of them trembling and Dean’s fingers wrapped in a bruising grip around Sam’s wrist, holding his arm in place around Dean’s waist. 

Sam knew that a happy ending was unlikely. So he let himself be happy, right then. Just for now.


End file.
